Will Chrome Mark Your Site as “Not Secure”?
With the release of Chrome 56 (estimated for release January 31, 2017), Chrome will be tagging website pages with forms as “not secure” if they don’t have a valid security certificate.
If you’re not sure if your forms are secured, look at the address bar while on your website. If the address is preceded by a green lock icon and the word “Secure”, your site is already secured. However, if you see an icon with a lower case i in a circle the site is not secured. A site that displays both the “Secure” and the i icon is partly secured.
With the new Chrome release, the i icon will be replaced with the words “Not Secure” and probably look something like the image below.
Why are they doing this?
To increase awareness and visibility. Any web page that collects information from a user should be secured. Without a security certificate there is increased risk of a website, and the information it collects, being compromised. This makes it easier for users to see if it’s safe to give their information to a website.
SEO Rankings
In 2014, Google announced it would be giving priority to to SSL enabled websites. This could seriously impact the rankings of any sites that are not secured.
Bottom Line
As hackers and other online bad guys get more creative in their antics, it becomes more important to secure your website. It will probably become mandatory to have a security certificate in the not too distant future.
The “Not Secure” message is going to scare a lot of users. For your, and your users, piece of mind, you should seriously consider getting a security certificate.
Get help setting up your HTTPS
117 Million LinkedIn Emails and Passwords For Sale
According to Motherboard, and confirmed by LinkedIn, the data was stolen during a hack in 2012.
A hacker going by the handle “Peace” announced that the data has been posted for sale on the dark web. The database contains approximately 167 million accounts, 177 million of those contain both emails and passwords.
Everyone should be changing their passwords on a regular basis but not everyone does. If you haven’t changed your LinkedIn password since 2012 you’ll want to do it now.
If even if you’ve changed your LinkedIn password you may not be off the hook.
If you use the same combination of email and password as you did on LinkedIn in 2012 on any other websites you should change those as well. Hackers are very aware that many people have a habit of reusing the same login information over many websites so those website accounts could be at risk.
Good web security practice is to change all your passwords every 6 months.
How to change your LinkedIn Password
(You can see the date your password was last changed there as well)