Thoughts on Online Security and Secure Surfing

hese days secure surfing online is not an easy thing to accomplish.  The speed at which the internet grew made the every days users privacy was one thing that got left behind.  The main component of this issue is the protocol that is used to transfer almost all of the information that goes back and forth as we surf the web.

The name of that language is called HTTP.  Anyone who has used the internet for long will recognize that it’s at the beginning of every web address you put in your browser.  Hyper Text Transfer Protocol as it’s called takes all the complex information on the internet and turns it into a easily transferable format in order to increase the speed of information transfer.  While the speed it provides is one of it’s biggest benefits, accelerating the growth of the internet, it is also a very insecure method of transferring information using easy to read ascii text.

If you were able to keep records of all the internet traffic of the average internet connection you will quickly see how easy it is to read.  No matter what sites you visit and how much information is passed back and forth, it is all very easily readable.  Plus the fact that all the information has traces of your IP address all over it, showing the address of your home computer.

For secure surfing this is a very big problem.  No matter what you do online, there are logs kept of where you have gone and what you have done at your ISP.  You might ask yourself “How secure are they really?”  This depends on who your ISP is.  Seeing as they can get every record of all the surfing activity you have done online, you can only hope that it’s extremely secure.

From your computer to the website and back there are several places that your information can be caught, the information stored and recorded for every web site you visit.  While all of these logs are totally leagel, because his data can contain personal information it is a tempting target for hackers and identity thieves who will use the information they collect for any number of illegal activities.

Due to these factors, secure web surfing is quickly starting to become a very important subject for individuals who do many of their daily tasks using their computer.  It can be a scary thought that once that easily readable packet of information leaves our computer that it’s stored somewhere that we have no influence over.

To protect myself online from these types of problems I pay an insignificant fee for a service that encrypts all my data online to a level similar to those used for the US military.  The service allows me to surf the web with almost 100% anonymity.  I use it for both my home and my work internet connection to keep my traffic from being monitored by the web sites that I look at and local wi-fi spots that I use.  The program is small, so it allows me to keep it on a USB thumb drive so I can take it with me and use it anywhere I go.