Show-Me State Times

The holiday season has prompted an increase in online shopping, with more than half of consumers planning to purchase gifts via the internet. However, this surge also brings a rise in scams. Prasad Calyam, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Missouri, offers several tips to help ensure safe online shopping.

To verify the legitimacy of an e-commerce website, Calyam advises using trusted sources for customer reviews and checking ratings through the Better Business Bureau. It's also beneficial to confirm that the store has a physical location and customer service information. For mobile apps, he suggests downloading from reputable sources like the Apple Store or Google Pay.

When making online payments, Calyam recommends ensuring transactions occur through secure sessions on legitimate sites. He suggests looking for a padlock icon and "https" at the beginning of a site's address as indicators of security.

Calyam identifies credit cards and services such as PayPal, Google Pay, or Apple Pay as safe payment methods due to their consumer protection features against fraud. Enabling multi-factor authentication can further enhance security during transactions.

Shopping on free or public Wi-Fi networks is discouraged due to inadequate security. Instead, Calyam suggests saving items in your cart while on public Wi-Fi and completing purchases later on a secure network.

Emails promoting discounts should be approached with caution; links should only be clicked after verifying they lead to legitimate vendors. Promotions that seem too good to be true may warrant skepticism.

Additional tips include skipping optional fields when providing information during transactions and avoiding saving payment details on websites. Using password managers can help organize login credentials across multiple sites. Regularly monitoring bank and credit card accounts for suspicious activity is also advised.

At Mizzou's Center for Cyber Education, Research and Infrastructure (CERI), courses cover various topics including data security and network security. These courses aim to prepare students for careers as cybersecurity professionals capable of addressing real-world cyber defense challenges.