The safety of our computer and personal data lives and dies on the premise of responsible usage. The internet is literally flooded with websites containing all sorts of malware and viruses threatening to turn any computer into a useless pile of hardware with one simple click. Furthermore, hackers are frontline scouts, always knowing which websites are the best prey for attacking unsuspecting readers. News sites are regular victims and to add salt to the wound, some of them even have security flaws capable of exposing their users to spies and hackers.
Secure The News is a Freedom of the Press Foundation project “designed to track and promote the adoption of HTTPS encryption by major news organizations’ websites”. The project searches and ranks news websites based on how safe they are for visitors and how easily they can be corrupted for not implementing safety practices such as the HTTPS standard. According to the project, only 28% of worldwide news sites actually offer this type of privacy protection to their users.
The report firmly crowned The Intercept as the safest news website in the world with the top A+ grade, followed by The Guardian, TechCrunch and ProPublica, all with A- grades. The American news site took the award for being the only site to use HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) preloading, a security policy mechanism that protects websites against eavesdropping and cookie hijacking by allowing servers to declare that browsers should only interact with it through secured HTTPS connections.
On the other end of the table, surprisingly, there are a couple of popular news websites such as The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Reuters, Sky News, LA Times, France 24, Euronews, and CNN among many others. All of these obtained an F rank since they don’t provide even the most basic of protections – a valid HTTPS connection.
The best tip we can give you is to always know how reliable a certain website is. Before you click any link, make sure to check for the magic presence of the S in HTTPS, meaning the site is secured with SSL encryption. Furthermore, never go online without decent antivirus software, which offers strong firewallsand helps you verify how reliable a site really is. Consider tuning your browsers accurately in order to prevent it from saving cookies – or setting it to delete all the collected information as soon as you finish browsing. You can also trust on a VPN, which will offer you secure connections via encrypted tunnels(particularly useful for public Wi-Fi lovers) or opt for combining it with an internet security suite like Bitdefender Total Security
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