These days, hackers are finding it easier and easier to prey upon web surfers who access websites through traditional, insecure means. You know what I mean here, right? A website has no special security when it has the typical “http://” in front of the address. If you’re visiting a site that has confidential or private information, you want to make sure the address starts with “https://” – which means the connection is encrypted. Your browser will also show a padlock or change the color of the address bar to tell you that security is enabled.
More and more websites actually have HTTPS-enabled sites, to protect their visitors – however, they don’t offer these sites by default, because typically they are slower to load, and can sometimes degrade the viewer experience. But if you want to “force” a secure connection to load when you visit those sites, there’s now a way to do that. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed an extension for the Firefox browser calledHTTPS Everywhere, which automatically enables a secure connection for the sites that have them. Some of the sites included in this extension are:
– Dropbox
– Google
– Twitter
– Meebo
– New York Times
– Washington Post
– Hotmail
– Microsoft
– PayPal
– Wikipedia
– Evernote
– WordPress
– Facebook
….and more. Unfortunately, the extension only works for Firefox – when do we get versions for Internet Explorer and Chrome, EFF?