People are told that the green padlock symbol at the address bar of a website means it's safe, but it seems that it's not the case, according to cybersecurity researchers. Scammers are ubiquitously hanging around and they would just sit there and wait for handsome money to get in from their online victims, but researchers suggested that people should now be more careful.
According to CNet, fraudulent websites have found a way to add a padlock on their sites in an attempt to trick people that the page is safe, where in fact, it's actually not. It is said that these padlocks are bright green in color in most browsers.
A data from cybersecurity firm PhishLabs suggested that almost half of the scam websites have the green https padlock, which implies that the page is safe, and assures people that it's fine to enter their personal information such as their credit card details. A report in October from an Anti-Phishing Working Group said that fraudsters are taking advantage of this "unclear security messaging."
"We've dumbed thing down to lock meaning 'safe'," John LaCour, Chief Technology Officer at PhishLabs said. "The lock doesn't tell you anything about the legitimacy of the site. It only tells you that your data is encrypted as it's sent over the internet."
The only way to avoid getting scammed is awareness, and to ensure that the website has a secure connection. A secure website uses an encrypted connection that starts with letters HTTPS and not HTTP although a lot of people are still unaware of these things to this date.
A secure connection makes the personal information, including passwords, protected so that no other pages or websites can read it, but only the intended one can. In 2015, PhishLabs started collecting data and roughly half percent of the scam websites actually used a green padlock symbol on their pages to make it look like they were legit.
According to the report, the number of these fraud websites increased quickly to around 24 percent in 2017. In the third quarter of 2018, the scam pages went up to 49 percent, which alarmed the security researchers.
What makes everything easier for scammers to create safe-looking websites is that it is now cheaper for them to use an encrypted connection, which they take advantage from the efforts of the cybersecurity experts at Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google, and other tech giants.
To be safe, users should always fact check all websites whenever they need to enter their personal information.
