Security protocol protects users against forgery, content alteration, other “malicious activities”
CHICAGO, July 26, 2016—Encyclopaedia Britannica®, Inc., announced today that it has added HTTPS encryption to its flagship website Britannica Online (www.britannica.com).
The new security protocol adds a number of additional protections beyond traditional HTTP content delivery. Britannica’s users are now protected from snooping, forgery, privacy infringement and other kinds of hacking mischief.
“When visiting a correctly configured and maintained HTTPS site, you can expect three things: authenticity, integrity, and encryption,” Wired.com reported recently.
The authenticity protection insures that the site the reader sees is the site she or he intended to visit, not a forgery. The integrity protection insures that material sent from Britannica’s servers is not altered on the way to the reader’s web browser. Encryption prevents hackers from spying on users and seeing the content they download or view from the website.
“Visiting an HTTPS site protects you against an array of malicious activities, including site forgery and content alteration,” said Ryan Bond, director, consumer products, for Britannica.
While HTTPS is an important innovation in Internet security and a number of top sites have adopted it, the web as a whole has been sluggish in moving in this direction. In March of this year Wired.com reported that most of the top 100 sites, accounting for 25 percent of worldwide Internet traffic, had not yet implemented HTTPS.
The effort required to implement the new security protocol varies by the type of site. Large, content-rich media and publishing platforms like Britannica’s typically pose the greatest challenges, since they include a wide range media types and elements from many sources, all of which must be delivered via HTTPS. Bond confirmed that Britannica.com, which includes hundreds of thousands of articles and special features, required a large-scale coordinated effort by the company’s systems operations, product-development and advertising staffs, “to insure that our servers, content and ads all render the way they’re supposed to.”
Britannica.com provides a rich learning, reading and research experience for curious people of all ages and interests. It covers a vast range of topics with factual, reliable information and presents contemporary issues in context with multimedia storytelling features such as “In the News” and “Demystified.” The site’s content is featured on Facebook and Twitter.
About Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. is a global leader in education publishing whose products are available in many media, including online and mobile devices. A pioneer in digital publishing since the early 1980s, the company today markets a variety of curriculum products for schools, language-study courses, online learning services, encyclopedias and other reference works and language products through its Merriam-Webster® subsidiary. The company is headquartered in Chicago.
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Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.