Keyword: security
Web Security in 2018
We're now well into 2018 and it's clear that this will be a big year for web security. For years the industry has been pushing for the ubiquitous use of encryption for websites (i.e. that all important s in https://). But we think that this is the year that will see the largest changes for websites that don't use this technology. We'll cover what this encryption actually is and is not, why these changes are happening, and what you should know about the future changes coming up this year.
The web as a whole has been moving toward encrypted browsing for a while. First, browsers started highlighting encrypted sites with a green security symbol in the address bar so highlight them favorably to internet users. Next, search engines started ranking sites higher that used encryption, giving a them a modest advantage. Now, this year in July we're going to see Google go a step further and mark all non-encrypted sites as insecure in Google Chrome. This will drastically reduce the number of users visiting these un-encrypted websites and will most likely almost completely cut-off any potential user engagement.