Protect Personal Information

President of the Barbados chapter of Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), Dwight Robinson, is urging local online users to be mindful about what they share with third parties while buying goods and services.

Robinson spoke to The Barbados Advocate recently about the risk of exposing personal information in the age of e-commerce. The head of the local IT group noted that with the increase of online businesses, some small business owners will share bank information such as account numbers with clients. In other cases, the customer will share their location or their address. Robinson said shoppers should be aware of what these businesses are asking for and what they are doing with it.

He gave a risky scenario where credit card information was shared with a company in public, where other people could hear and record it.

Robinson stressed the importance of protecting one’s data and not revealing this type of information in public or on public sites, instead opting for secure, temporary, or private settings or channels.

Dark web dangers

Robinson told this newspaper that online users’ data can be stored by malicious individuals. He cited the dark web (an underworld of the Internet) where people engage in illegal activities and illegal transactions.

The IT specialist is therefore encouraging people to avoid using websites that look unusual or ask for information that is not typical for specific online transactions. Also, he said that online users should look for “HTTPS” in the web browsers which have Secure Socket Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. With TLS, there is an authentication and security protocol that is widely implemented in browsers and Web servers. In this era, all secure websites should have a padlock icon before the web address, he explained.