Protect your most valuable online asset: Your Customer's Trust.
The security of your digital assets and your customers' private information should be an important factor you take into account when planning your e-commerce site. Thousands of incidents of online fraud and theft are reported each year and many more go unreported to save the victim company from losing customer confidence. You can prevent your site from becoming a target of such crimes by using common sense in dealing with your customers' private information and by implementing the industry standard security technologies: secure socket layer and site identity certification.

What in the world is SSL?
Digital certificates encrypt data using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology, the industry-standard method for protecting web communications. The SSL security protocol provides data encryption, server authentication, message integrity, and optional client authentication for a TCP/IP connection. Because SSL is built into all major browsers and web servers, simply installing a digital certificate turns on their SSL capabilities.

SSL comes in two strengths, 40-bit and 128-bit, which refer to the length of the "session key" generated by every encrypted transaction. The longer the key, the more difficult it is to break the encryption code. Most browsers support 40-bit SSL sessions, and the latest browsers enable users to encrypt transactions in 128-bit sessions - trillions of times stronger than 40-bit sessions.

Site Identity Certificates.
Site identity certificates (also know as SSL certificates) are a complementary technology to the secure socket layer protocol in that they provide a mechanism for a web server to be uniquely identified during SSL communication. This type of security is important because it covers a weakness of SSL: the risk of server impersonation. Although it would be difficult, it is possible that a hacker could intercept or redirect a customer on your web site to a different web server disguised as your order page. If your site used SSL and had a certificate, your customer's web browser would immediately detect that the hacker's server was missing the correct certificate that identifies your site and an error message would be displayed.

OMEGABYTE.NETWORKS offers both 40bit SSL and 128-bit SSL certificates with site identity certification to our hosting customers. The more popular 128-bit SSL certificates are available through OMEGABYTE from Geotrust (an Equifax company) and Thawte (a Verisign company).

Product	Geotrust	Thawte
40bit (new)	$99.00	$125.00
40bit (renewal)	$79.00	$100.00
128bit (new)	$149.00	$300.00
128bit (renewal)	$12900	$275.00
Initiating CSR and installing Cert	$50.00	$50.00