Well, it's April. In the United States, April means taxes. And in recent years, April means huge numbers of tax returns filing online. Last year over ten million tax returns were filed on the Internet. This year I expect the numbers to greatly exceed last year's.

Why do I bring this up? Tax returns in many ways are the poster children for the need for online security. Where else do you have all the information a criminal requires to steal your identity gathered together in a single, convenient place? Your return includes your Social Security Number, full name, spouse's name, and address. It says the banks in which you have accounts, whether or not you own a home, and even how much you make, so the criminals can more easily target the highest value victims.

This NetworkWorld article describes the presentations of some MIT researchers in the areas of wireless networking and phishing. The phishing portion in particular was interesting to me in that it reports,

Given that phishing schemes are so tricky, [MIT Assistant Professor] Miller's team is concentrating its efforts on redesigning browsers so that a user's intentions are clear to them. In other words, if a user wants to go to the site of a certain retailer, the browser would confirm the real URL for the retailer rather than letting the user go to a similar-looking, but bogus site. Key to doing this is improving not just security but usability, as Miller noted that enough roadblocks have already been thrown in front of users -- in the name of security -- when they try to conduct transactions on the Web.

What's noteworthy of course is that this paragraph is a...

This NetworkWorld article shows the extent companies will go to in order to protect themselves from phishing. In this case, we're talking about signing e-mails with digital certificates. Even though it's an added expense that comes with additional IT burden, and even though it only works for a segment of the company's customers, this German bank is still making the investment because it understands the importance of keeping its customers online rather than going in to visit branch offices.

This problem is the one that High Assurance SSL Certificates are designed to fix. The companies that know the bottom-line value of customers using the Web site are going to any lengths they can to keep them coming in that way. Once they're able to put High Assurance certificates on their pages, that...

We're on the verge of the most significant development in SSL since the origin of the technology ten years ago. I'm not speaking in hyperbole, either. 2006 will see the widespread adoption of a brand new kind of SSL Certificate. And those among us who download and install the latest browsers will learn to look at SSL-protected Web pages in a whole new way.