Online shopping to get another security layerIt's no more a news that online shopping is catching up in India. With a mouse-click one can buy virtually anything online while sitting in the comfort of home. From greeting cards to luxury cars, from mobile phones to state of the art LCD televisions, from pocket PCs to super computers, from clothing to travel packages, from home loans to life insurance - everything can be purchased online today. As the volume of electronic commerce increases, the concerns around online payment transactions also swell and rightly so. The Reserve Bank of India is introducing new measures to protect online shoppers from cyberspace hacking attacks. The companies and banks involved in handling the online payments will be required to support added layers of security to ensure the safety of online shoppers. This is a great news for online shoppers. Along with the standard account name and password, companies will have to support security features that the hackers cannot break into easily. Currently, most of the shopping websites require you to specify your credit card number, expiry date and the security code all of which is available on the credit-card itself. Anyone who gets hold of your credit-card will have access to all this information and can easily misuse it. Same information can fall into hackers' hands in case the website you passed it to is not secure (doesn't encrypt your data during transfer). RBI will enforce that all e-commerce sites and the banks/financial institutions involved in the transaction handling are secured, and that they ask consumers for more secure information than just that standard credit card information which anyone can have access to. For example, consumers may be SMS'd a frequently changing security-key that they will be required to enter for approving a payment. They may also be asked for some personalized key that they chose at the time of registration. The idea essentially is to ask consumers multiple pieces of information which don't reside in the same system or same device to make it harder for anyone other than the owner to gain access to all the required information for approving an online payment. Such security enforcements will make online shoppers more comfortable shopping online!
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