The Digital Certificate - What’s It Mean and Why is It Important?

What is a digital certificate? What does it mean to you and why is it so important? If you’re a consumer and a World Wide Web traveler, then digital certificates are something you need to know about. The digital certificate is pushing far beyond the initiative and finding transformations amidst various service providers with developing e-commerce and many business to business operations. These digital certificates are being used to authenticate consumers and to secure all transactions, data, and messages. The digital certificate is used to implement electronic signatures. Not to mention keeping the online community safe from hackers and those fraudulent individuals seeking to steal information from the uneducated internet consumer. One of the great benefits of digital certificates is to allow carriers to add multiple layers of security and make improvements on administration.

Digital certificates have grown out of the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), that employs cryptography to all it’s authenticate consumers and enable internet consumers to privately and securely exchange information. A digital certificate of authority is used under PKI to maintain and distribute all private and public keys that are used in conjunction with each other. For security purposes there must be a combination of a private key and a public key in order to authenticate a consumer, so a transaction can be made. A PKI also provides for a digital certificate that can identify any individual consumer or organization through directory services that can store or revoke any digital certificates, as the need may be. Most Web browsers have been the largest PKI users so far and although many consumers are not aware of it, they are using digital certificates every time they open a browser at a secure website.

While the public key is made accessible to the consumers, the private key is most often sent via e-mail to the consumers through a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a protocol used to secure transactions. Once the private key is sent to the consumer, it is then stored in a browser. When the digital certificate authority acknowledges the public and private keys, only then can the consumer have access to the information they desire. The X509 is used to format the digital certificates and the primary purpose of the digital certificate server is to represent a reliable third party by attending to confirmation, authentication and distribution of the public keys. The third party is called the certificate authority.

VeriSign has been the dominating company in the digital certificate authority field, although there has been a growing amount of companies that want to issue their own digital certificates. Some of the companies following in VeruSign’s lead are Entrust Technologies, GTE CyberTrust Solutions and Xcert, the latter having produced WebSentry and SentryCA. Xcert has become a popular choice among other service providers and are attempting to become the next leading digital certificate authority.

Along with increasing security, digital certificates have reduced the number of passwords a consumer needs to remember in order to access other networks and domains. This one time sign on approach has become very appealing for all those e-commerce applications. Instead of enduring all those respective requests for the consumers’ user name and password, the consumer can easily gain access to all the desired networks and domains for where they have rights.

Digital certificates also benefit consumers by creating an electronic auditing trail that permits companies to be able to track down who and what transactions were made and who had accessed what area. Some companies use the electronic auditing system to track their customers on their customer service sites to help them understand what kinds of problems their consumers are having. Another use for digital certificate authority in auditing systems is fraud control.

Digital certificates have been used for many years on the internet to securely identify individual consumers and businesses. Although one constant challenge of issuing digital certificates is positively confirming the certificate holders’ identity. Digital certificates have become a standard at how they are used and defined. This standardization also permits many financial institutions to release digital certificates and become confident that they will be accepted on multiple websites. Some financial institutions are normally trusted, such as credit unions, who have become excellent candidates for certificate authorities.

Top Four Ways to Ensure a Secure Password

If you use a computer or go online, you are going to need a password. You need a password to get into a computer, to go online or to enter a website. Many websites now require a password to enter. Without a doubt, creating and remembering various passwords are a pain. Managing your passwords safely may mean having to make up numerous arcane number and letter combinations, all according to each website’s required minimum or maximum character count. You may have to memorize or take many notes on what password belongs to what website. And when you’re done logging all your passwords with the corresponding websites - it’s time to change them again. Unfortunately, passwords are a necessary evil to keep your information private and secured.

Your password should be as least obvious as possible. For instance, you never want to use your name, or your spouse, child or dog’s name. These are too easy. If you like collecting pyramids don’t use “pyramid” as your password. If you are a wrestling fan, don’t create a password after a popular wrestler. And so on. You want to keep your passwords safe by not making them so obvious. Uncovered passwords are the easiest way for a hacker to break in to your online account and have their way with your account until you discover something’s wrong. Hackers are known for scouring the World Wide Web in search of finding passwords that match with dictionary listings and they also have perfected other tools to help find those easy passwords.

Most people find it very difficult to manage their passwords. During a recent online survey, Over fifty percent of online consumers report using a combination of numbers and letters in their passwords while many of them admitted to using the name of pet or a person; 40% report keeping their passwords written down in notebooks or post it’s, where they can be easily viewed, lost or stolen; 34% report they have never changed their passwords; And 27% of these passwords users describe themselves as PC professionals.

Appropriate password management will never be easy, but you can at least simplify it. Prevention is the key. If you can prevent your password from being discovered, you are protecting yourself and your personal and financial information from hackers. Here are the top four ways to insure a secure password:

1. Trick your memory into creating better passwords. You can start with the title of a movie you saw recently or a favorite book. You can take the first letter of each title word and add a meaningful number at the beginning, middle, or end, such as your golden birthday or the year you started school. Each time you update your password, you can use a different movie, book and year. For your minor online accounts such as movie sites, news sites and other websites that don’t have your personal or financial information, you may choose a combination of initials and a month or year you graduated from high school, such as RWS061993 for the Herald News. For the more critical website passwords, such as your banking and credit card accounts, make the password as difficult as possible, perhaps by using a series of letters and numbers, like 10rT31w05s. The password can also become more difficult to create or remember if the website is case sensitive.

2. Never use the same password with every website or for all of your transactions. Although this only makes for one password to remember, once your password is figured out, the hacker can get into all of your accounts. Hackers can cause a lot of damage before they are discovered and this is what you want to prevent.

3. Try a password management tool to help reduce the hassle of managing your passwords. If you decide to use a password management tool, find one that will encrypt and store all of your data on your PC, such as Siber System or Roman Labs. Be careful if you are allowing Windows to store your passwords, especially if the PC is shared by other people. Multiple users can put your passwords at risk.

4. Change all of your critical website passwords often, usually every 3 months or so. For the minor online websites, or those without your personal or financial information, you should change those at least once or twice a year.