Symantec Challenges Online Retailers To Make This Year’s Holiday Shopping Season The Safest On Record

Symantec has issued a challenge to online retailers to make this year’s holiday shopping season the safest on record. In order to prepare, the company released an enhanced version of its best-in-class encryption tool, Symantec SSL Assistant Plus, to make it easy for online retailers and other sites to encrypt and keep their customers safe.

“When it comes to SSL encryption, you get what you pay for,” said Quentin Liu, vice president, engineering at Symantec. “With Symantec SSL Assistant Plus, we’re delivering extreme value over free, basic SSL options by hiding complexity and helping to ensure that websites are properly secured. In addition, we make the entire process as simple and intuitive as installing an app on a phone. SSL Assistant Plus is also backed by our world class technical support organization and offers peace of mind because it’s created by security experts. Our goal is to create a safer web as less than one percent of online sites today are encrypted and use certificates.”

Last year, the Heartbleed vulnerability left half a million websites at risk, raising awareness for the importance of strong SSL/TLS encryption. Internet sites around the world for banking, healthcare, government, education and social media rely on SSL encryption to help keep their data and their customers’ data secure. Online retailers in particular depend on SSL to ensure a secure link for financial transactions and to keep sensitive information safe. But setting up SSL encryption is a technical process, and for many website owners it can be too complicated. With SSL Assistant Plus, Symantec has simplified the experience of setting up encryption and delivering security in an easy way.

Symantec SSL Assistant Plus cuts the time it takes to set up encryption down to minutes by removing arduous steps that require technical experience.  It automates the entire configuration process, giving customers the assurance that comes from knowing configuration of their servers is secure and vulnerability free.

In a U.S. online consumer study, 91 percent of respondents said that they would not continue an online transaction if they saw a warning indicating the absence of a secure connection (Symantec Online Consumer Study, November 2013). In fact, securing a site and using the Norton Secured seal resulted in a 27 percent increase in a shopper’s likelihood of completing their purchase (Symantec Internal Study, February 2015).

With SSL Assistant Plus, the four most common browser warnings will become a thing of the past. By using a secure connection, e-commerce sites can reduce the types of browser warnings that spook online shoppers away from their sites. SSL encryption alerts online shoppers that their information is safe by showing a lock icon in the address bar.

Unlike competitor offerings, Symantec supports simple installation and use of all certificate types. Symantec SSL Assistant Plus enables website owners to use Domain Validation (DV) certificates, as well as Organization Validation (OV) and Extended Validation (EV) certificates, which verify the real organization or business behind a website. When sites also use EV certificates with SSL, shoppers will see the address bar turn green and include the site owner’s name. This gives businesses of any size the same power to protect themselves and their customers as the largest retailers in the world.