eHelpHow would you like to show your passwords to strangers? No? We didn't thnik so. But every time you connect to a remote computer, there is a possibility that someone else on the network could "sniff" your password. These pages tell you how to avoid that.
You probably already know that web sites can be secure. This means that all the information sent back and forth between your browser and the web site is encrypted: your password, your credit card number, everything. You can tell that a web site is secure by looking for the locked padlock icon in your browser, and also looking to see that the address in the address or URL bar at the top of the browser starts with "https://" rather than "http://". To see what this looks like in your browser, go to this web page in secure mode (the text will be the same, so you can just keep reading).
But there are other ways you send information back and forth over the Internet: email (we'll have detailed information about this soon), file transfers, and "shell access": logging on to the command line of a remote computer. These latter two can especially put you at risk, because you may be using an old, insecure method of connecting.
Back in the Twentieth Century, people used File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to upload web pages and do all other kinds of file transfers with remote computers. FTP is insecure; please use Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) instead. Here are links and instructions for using SFTP with Windows, Mac, and common web design programs.
Also dating from the Twentieth Century, telnet allowed you to connect to the "command line" of a remote computer (the "DOS prompt" is an example of a command line). Most people don't have a need for this sort of thing, but if you do, please use Secure Shell (SSH) instead. Here are instructions for using SSH on Windows and Mac.
This page was last updated on April 22, 2008.
