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Securing Your Transactions
As more and more consumers become familar with the web, an increasing number of your customers will want to conduct their business through electronic commerce. Just like using a credit card over the telephone or through the mail, entering credit card information on the web has certain risks. In order to insure that your customers' data is as protected as possible while they are conducting business with you, you will want to offer them a secure environment for electronic transactions. A secure server is a web environment in which all data is encrypted in route from the sending server (where you web page lives) and the receiving server (where ITPS lives). The encryption makes it extremely difficult -- we never say impossible -- for a computer criminal to intercept the transmission and misuse your customers' data. The ITPS secure server uses an encryption technology called "Secure Sockets Layer", or SSL, for short. When a transaction is sent to a secure server using SSL, the sending server and the receiving server do a "handshake" before the data is sent. In this "handshake", the sending server makes sure that the receiving server is the one it expects. Then the encryption keys are exchanged. The data is encrypted before it is transmitted to the secure server, and decrypted by the secure server before it is handed off to the application destined to process it. Consumers can tell when they are on a secure server by looking at the symbol in the bottom left hand corner of their web browsers (the symbol is a key in Netscape 3.X, and a lock in Netscape version 4.51). When the browser is displaying a page from a server that is not secure, the key appears broken, or the lock appears open (not locked). When the browser is displaying a page from a server that is using the SSL, the key appears solid, or, the lock appears to be closed (locked).
For Internet Explorer, it works a little differently. When the Internet Explorer browser is displaying an html page that is not secure, no symbol appears on the bottom menu bar at all. When the browser displays a secure page, the closed lock symbol appears somewhere in the middle of the bottom menu bar. By default, a dialogue box is displayed when you move from a unsecure page to a secure page -- but you can turn the dialogue box off.
Since the sending server does not have to be secure to particpate in the handshake, as long as the receiving server is secure, you can offer your customers this state of the art encryption technology with no additional expense. To use ITPS' secure server, change your form action from:
to: https://www.neodata.com/ITPS2
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