Credit Card Transactions on BookBrowse

Your credit card transaction at BookBrowse is secure because it is processed through our secure server using 256-bit encryption - the highest level of encryption available. Your credit card details are passed directly to Paypal, our payment processor. We do not store any details of your credit card on BookBrowse, therefore even if someone was to hack into BookBrowse they would not have access to your financial details. For more about how your privacy is protected on BookBrowse, please see BookBrowse's Privacy Statement.

Although your transaction at BookBrowse is secure, you may wish to read on for tips to help protect yourself on the internet.

Q. How do I know my online transactions are secure?

A. Before buying anything on a website, look at the address bar at the top of the browser. If you are on a secure site (for example, https://www.bookbrowse.com/join) you will notice that the address starts with "https" - the "s" meaning that it is a secure site. The web browser indicates a page is secure by displaying a small picture of a padlock. The position of this padlock varies but is often at the left of the URL field (i.e to the left of the website address at the top of the screen).

The padlock indicates that you are on a secure page in the website. Technically, it means that you have an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) link with at least 128-bit encryption.

There are a number of different security services. BookBrowse uses Trustwave Security Services. When you see a secure certificate such as the one below, click on the image and a new window will pop up. Read the information in this window to be sure that you're conneced to a site that is both legitimate and secure - the certificate should be valid and also the name on the certificate should match the website in question.
While checking the padlock and secure certificate are a good first step, they do not in themselves protect you from cyber-crime.


Q. What about Virus software, does that help protect me?

A. Safety online starts with keeping your computer secure by protecting it from viruses and other Internet threats. There are a number of things you can do to ensure that your computer is protected.

• Ensure that you have a good antivirus product installed.
  
• Keep your Internet browser and computer up-to-date. Internet browsers are constantly updated with patches that make them even more resistant to the latest external threats. Normally these updates happen automatically with a message asking if you wish to update your software, but even so you should always ensure that you have all the latest patches for your browser and operating system.
  
• Ensure that your computer is password-protected - especially if it is kept in an area where other people may have access to it.
  

Q. What about Spam & Phishing?

A. Spam is the "junk email" of the internet. At its most benign, spam emails are simply messages that you have not chosen to receive but are sent to you anyway - for example, websites sometimes sell their mailing lists to other websites, so you might find yourself giving your address to one website and then getting an email from others - just as you might sign up to receive a catalog by mail and find that, over time, you get a number of others that you haven't requested. Many websites will state their policy regarding sharing email addresses at the time you sign up. If you don't see such a policy, consider using a disposable email address that will forward email to your regular email address (there are many free services offering this service - search the web for "disposable email address" to find one that suits your needs).

When it comes to BookBrowse, we are proud to say that we have never and will never sell, give-away or rent our mailing list.

Phishing is a more malicious form of spam that attempts to get personal information from you by pretending to be an email or website from a trustworthy source. Be very cautious about opening email attachments unless you are certain that the sender is legitimate. Even be careful about emails from friends, as if their email is hacked (stolen) you might receive emails that look like they come from them, asking you to open a file or send money, but are not! Perhaps the most common phishing technique is pretending to be a legitimate website in the hope that people will enter sensitive information such as passwords, credit card numbers and so forth. Such phishing sites tend to get their traffic in two ways. The first is to send an email pretending to be, say, your bank and ask you to login. The link you see on the page might look correct, but the actual website you land on will be a fake. The second way that phishing sites get traffic is by registering domain names that are very similar to a popular website and wait for visitors to misspell the website name and end up on their site. For this reason, you should always check the URL of the website to make sure that it is correct. For example: www.chase.com is the correct website of Chase Bank; but www.tricky.chase.com might well be a phishing site - as might www.cahse.com.



Summary

We hope that this information was informative and useful. Naturally, this is a big subject, and so the above is only intended to give you a few suggestions and starting points.

You may also be intewrested in reading our Privacy Policies

If you do have any other concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Best regards,

BookBrowse Technical Support