Category: CyberSecurity

1) Include detailed information about your company

When buying things online, the biggest concern of customers is whether it is a legit company behind the website, and how can they contact the company if they encounter problem. Thus, the best way to prove that you run a legitimate business is by including a detailed company and contact information on the “About Us” and “Contact Us” page. It will definitely boost their confidence and trust towards your web store.

Many web stores provide only a contact form or a generic email address, visitors may feel sketchy about it. Make sure that your company’s telephone number and physical address are also included and can be easily found by customers.

State the year of establishment of your company, describe your company’s leadership and staff, and provide more information about your product sources. All these factor plays important roles to help your customer decide if they can trust your web store.

2) Add a “Money-Back Guarantee” policy to your web store

Having an excellent return policy will sure help to increase customer trust towards your online store. Customers wants to know what they can do if they receive your product with bad condition. This is especially true when your web store are selling product that is not cheap.

A “Money-Back Guarantee” shows how confident you are about your product. It encourage your visitors to go ahead and make a purchase by lowering the potential risk that your customers assume, as customer will feel more secure to buy from a website that has this policy.

Typically, a 30-day refund policy will be sufficient.

3) Build a strong customer service team

According to surveys, customers would rather choose to buy from an online store that has a great customer service, than an online store with poor customer service. From this, it can be seen that having a knowledgeable and responsive customer service team is the key. Customers prefer an online store that always have somebody to answer the questions they had, to give advice on action, and to solve problems they encounter.

Make sure yourself or your customer service team are always available for customer inquiries. Use instant messaging chats on your website, hire the best people to provide professional support. It’s important to answer inquires as quickly and possible.

4) Testimonials is important

You should know that comments in the testimonials and reviews is 10 times more convincing than what said about yourself. Testimonials helps your customer to better understand your product, more than that, it give credibility to your online store as it prove that you had delivered the actual product to your customers, and your customers are satisfied with it.

So, start requesting your happy customers to post online reviews. Make sure the people that comments are real, ask them to upload their photo and information properly. Don’t be afraid to receive negative reviews, you can learn and adjust your offerings based on the negative reviews. You can even publicly respond to negative comments in a good manner in order to showcase your efforts of giving them the best quality of service you can.

5) The SSL Certificate

Last but not least, an SSL certificate is more important than you think. Most of the major browser especially Google Chrome had their punishment on websites which do not have an SSL certificate. If Chrome puts a “Not Secure” label right beside your URL address bar, it will definitely distrust your visitors. Hence, having an SSL certificate is essential for every online store in order to avoid the unwanted damage to your reputation.

If you had an Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificate, it will be a different story. EV certificate is a proof to every visitor that a legit company is behind the online store. Once it is issued, the famous green bar that contains your company name will be displayed before your URL.

This green icon will give users an added layer of confidence and significantly improve their trust towards your online store. EV certificate is the hallmark of the highest level of security, this is the reason why EV are mostly used by large companies and online (e-commerce) stores.

WebNIC provides comprehensive security features including SSL solutions and antimalware software to ensure adequately safeguarding of sites. Join us as a web-service reseller now! Visit here to view SSL brands that we carry.

Back in July 2018, Google started to marks all websites that do not have an SSL certificate as “Not Secure” in Chrome version 68, which means when you visits a website that start with only HTTP but not HTTPS, you’ll be seeing a “Not Secure” notification beside the URL bar.

 

As we all know, Chrome are the most commonly used web browsers in the world, it is being used by over 60% of people on the internet, this makes any updates on Google Chrome matter to all website owner.

Google claims that the warning helps user to understand that the site they’re on isn’t secure and, at the same time, motivates the site’s owner to improve the security of their site.

The updates in Chrome 68 is just a beginning of Google’s plans, in October, Google’s applies a new update to Chrome version 70, the “Not Secure” notifications now turns red when users are entering data on an HTTP page.

 

This makes the “Not Secure” warning more obvious than before. As a website owner, you certainly won’t like to see the website you’ve invested so much time and resources being labeled as “Not Secure.” It puts fear in users and raises their concerns about the non-secure nature of your site, causing negative impact on your built customer trust as well as site’s traffic.

In addition to Chrome, other major web browsers such as Firefox, Safari, IE, etc. are also working on plans to mark the “Not Secure” warning on HTTP sites more obvious in future updates.

Mozilla Firefox had already support two new browser preferences that highlight HTTP websites as “not secure” in the URL bar on Firefox 60 and newer versions, users can choose the preference they prefer to indicate the security of sites.

 

It is just a matter of time before Firefox apply the “Non-Secure” indicator preference to all users by mandatory, same as Chrome.

Moreover, in November 2011, Safari added a warning in the Smart Search field when loading non-secure pages to the Safari Technology Preview 70, a version of the web browser Apple uses to test technology.

 

This shows that Safari are now testing “Not Secure” warning for HTTP websites, and there is great possibility that this feature will be apply on future updates.

After all of these, more and more users started to aware the unsafety of a HTTP websites and the importance to surf with HTTPS websites. Users now prefer surfing websites that has a “Secure” label, as they can have less worries when entering sensitive data and making payment on the website.

It is hard to say that Chrome and these major web browsers won’t apply even more aggressive updates on HTTP sites in future. In conclusion, we are heading towards a future where HTTPS page encryption becomes a standard requirement for all web pages.

How to avoid the “Not Secure” warning

Fortunately, it doesn’t really cost much to avoid all this trouble. All you have to do is to install a SSL Certificate to your website!

In general, SSL Certificate are categorized into 3 types:

• – Domain Validated Certificate (DV)
• – Organization Validated Certificate (OV)
• – Extended Validated Certificates (EV)

Both of them provide data encryption, but each of them went through a different verification process for different purposes. The cheapest and least secure being the Domain Validated (DV) Certificate, followed by the Organization Validated (OV) Certificate and the most secure being the Extended Validation (EV) Certificate.

However, it is not necessary that all websites have to obtain the most secure EV Certificate, every owner may just select the appropriate certificate that suits the nature of their website. You may click here to find out how to choose the appropriate certificate for your website.

As the largest Internet service provider in South East Asia, WebNIC offers web security and SSL solutions from RapidSSL, Thawte, and GeoTrust ensuring our partners and their customers are safe browsing the World Wide Web. Click here to join us as a web-service reseller.

Ever since Google marks all websites that do not have an SSL certificate as “Not Secure” in Chrome version 68 and other major browser planning to follow, SSL is no longer an optional but mandatory in the future.

Basically, there are 3 types of SSL certificate on the market, which is Domain Validation (DV), Organization Validation (OV), and Extended Validation (EV). However, it is not necessary that all websites have to take the most expensive certificates, but it doesn’t mean all website can just take cheap certificates. Every website owner should select the appropriate certificate that suits the nature of their website.

Keep in mind that all types of SSL certificates provide the same high level of data encryption, they differ in the level of validation between your business and the Certificate Authority. Other than that, different packages with different prices are different in term of the warranty given, number of domains, etc.

Domain Validation (DV)

The DV SSL certificates validates that the particular domain is registered and the site administrator is running the website. The validation is very simple and automated, it only takes about few minutes, making it cost less than other SSL certificates.

Because to its simplicity and inexpensive cost, it’s just perfect for small blogs or small websites where trust and credibility are less important. It might also suits small to medium-sized business sites that only need encryption for logins, forms or other non-transactional data.

After installing DV, a padlock icon will be added beside your URL, and the HTTP will turn into HTTPS. You can now avoid the annoying “Not Secure” message from the browsers in order to protect your image.

 

Organization Validation (OV)

 

OV SSL certificate is a proof to every visitor that a real company is behind the website. You will need to verify specific details about the company, including the company’s name, registration number, and address.

Every visitor are able to find out the information of the company by just checking the details of certificate inside the padlock icon. Here is an example of google.com:

 

An OV certificate is always a better option than DV for every company’s web site, as it will improve your overall reputation and make your websites seems more legitimate in perception of your clients, encourage potential business partners to reach you.

 

Extended Validation (EV)

The EV SSL certificate requires businesses to provide even more documents to prove their ownership of a company. It takes extra times and efforts to validate, usually days or weeks. This is what make it the most expensive among all.  

 

 

Once it is issued, the famous green bar that contains your company name will be displayed before your URL.

This green icon will give users an added layer of confidence and significantly improve their trust towards your websites. EV certificate is the hallmark of the highest level of security, this is the reason why EV are mostly used by large companies and online (e-commerce) stores.

So, had you decided which type of SSL certificate you are going to install in your website? Make sure you had invested the right one in order to maximize the advantages you can get! Don’t think about it as a security instrument only, think about it as a versatile tool that can strengthen the general public opinion about your websites and business.

WebNIC provides comprehensive web security features including SSL solutions and antimalware software to ensure adequately safeguarding of sites. Join us as a web-service reseller now! Visit here to view SSL brands that we carry.

We are visiting a bunch of websites every day, however, most of the people probably don’t pay much attention to the address bar and did not notice that there is two kind of starting of an URL, which is HTTP (http://) and HTTPS (https://). Even though you had noticed about it, but do you ever wonder what is the differences between them? Will it have any impacts to your internet security?

HTTP: No Data Encryption

HTTP refers to “hypertext transfer protocol”, it allows web browsers and servers to communicate through the exchange of data. As soon as a Web user opens their Web browser, the user is indirectly making use of HTTP. For example, when you enter a URL in your browser, this actually sends an HTTP command to the Web server directing it to fetch and transmit the requested Web page.

Unfortunately, HTTP are only focus in transmitting the data. Any data such as username/password and bank details that the users entered in the website will be sent plaintext to the server. During the transmission, the unencrypted data can be potentially intercepted by people with bad intention.

HTTPS: Data Encrypted

HTTPS and HTTP are essentially the same, both of them are referring to “hypertext transfer protocol”. What differences is, the data that the user entered in the website are encrypted, and hence it can prevent hackers’ interception.

The “S” from HTTPS is an abbreviation of the word “Secure”, it appears in the URL when a website is secured by a Secured Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. SSL is a standard security technology that encrypt the data transmitted between the server and your browser. In addition, it authenticates the identity of a website by validating the domain and company.

What are the advantages of having an SSL certificate / HTTPS to your website?

With the SSL certificate, the users:

1. Can know that their data is being transmitted securely.

2. Can validate that they are communicating with the exact company if the website obtained Organization Validated SSL Certificates.

3. Thus, users can have less worries and enhance their internet experience with the website.

The advantages gained by the owner includes:

1. Increased in the protection over their customer’s information.

2. Increased in user’s confidence, as customers are more likely to entered sensitive data or purchases from sites that is SSL certified.

3. Improved Google search ranking, as Google officially announced that HTTPS would become a ranking signal.

WebNIC provides comprehensive security features including SSL and antimalware software to ensure adequately safeguarding of sites. Visit here to view SSL brands that we carry.