Building Trust 2 October 2017

Best Practice: Extended Validation Certificates (EVSSL)

We increasingly live, interact, and do business online, making the concept of online trust more important than ever before. Unfortunately, our increased reliance on Internet-based transactions has also resulted in an exponential rise in identity theft.

Identity theft is everyone’s problem. An online thief who tricks you into using a single fake site can use your password to hack into everything, including email profiles, social networking sites, bank accounts, and sensitive corporate pages. These thieves are very sophisticated and can replicate the look and feel of legitimate websites, fooling millions of consumers each year.

EV Certificates are an effective way to distinguish legitimate websites from sites operated by fraudsters.We recommend that organizations deploy an EV Certificate on any site requiring a secure connection.

IT departments should assist management and end users in understanding that EV Certificates will protect the security of users and reduce the organization’s vulnerability to attacks. All users should use browsers that support EV Certificates and every website conducting online transactions should evaluate EV certificates as part of their security and brand protection strategy.

EV-secured sites undergo a rigorous verification process established by the CA/Browser Forum, a collaboration of leading certification authorities and browser software vendors. This verification process confirms the identity and existence of website operators using reliable third party sources. Users visiting an EV-secured website will see a green bar and the organization’s name in the URL bar, providing visual reassurance of the website operator’s identity.

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