Securing RAFINO.ORG

Look at the space at the top of the screen where you will see the address of our website, www.rafino.org.  In fact, the full address is "https://www.rafino.org".  For those of you who have an eye for little details, you will notice that previously that address was "http://www.rafino.org".  You will also notice that to the left of that address is a little icon of a padlock.

So what's the deal here?

Up until recently, we have run the website such that communications between your PC and our website were sent in-the-clear and, thus, potentially vulnerable to "man in the middle" attacks by bad guys who intercept those communications.  In the past, this was a very low risk situation.  However, more and more we are seeing the bad guys getting better at their nefarious craft.

We have eliminated that risk by a change we just introduced this week in which we have changed all of the pages and features on  the website to run under https (secure, encrypted protocol) instead of http (unencrypted).  The encryption is automatic and industrial strength and requires no action on your part other than to always check for the padlock when accessing RAFINO.ORG; no padlock, no security!  

For those of you interested in some of the nitty gritty of this protection, check out the YouTube tutorial at the bottom of this article. 

This is just another part of our plan to keep you and your data secure.

If you should encounter a situation where you think you have logged into our website and you do NOT see that padlock, please let us know at webmaster@rafino.org.

HTTPS Tutorial