Safety and Security
Since the earliest days of online casinos, players have expressed concern regarding the safety of their personal details, their deposits and winnings and their activities in general actually when operating over the internet.
In response to these concerns, online operators have spent enormous amounts of money purchasing and developing the tools to ensure that their clients will consistently enjoy the highest levels of security and privacy that modern technology can provide. All of the top-rated casinos now provide facilities that are guaranteed “state of the art”.
All information that is passed to and from a player’s PC to an online casino as well as that generated during play must be stored for future reference and thus it must be well protected. The first line of defence is normally a firewall. This is a piece of software that can be programmed to listen for and analyse every piece of data passed to or from the server that it monitors. The firewall has strict rules regarding what data may be passed and what must be blocked. Many secure servers employ multiple firewalls as an additional precaution. Firewalls are designed primarily to prevent access by illegal programmes designed to steal data such as user names and passwords or to corrupt it as in the case of viruses. Dedicated anti-virus software is used to supplement firewall defences.
Additional security is required to safeguard sensitive personal data such as credit card or bank account numbers, email and other contact details. For these purposes, all such data is stored in encrypted form that can only be decrypted by legal access to the site using the valid credentials for a specific account. These days, online casinos and poker rooms employ highly advanced encryption techniques and the industry standard is the highest available 128-bit encryption, identical to that employed by the US ministry of defence, the CIA and the FBI.
Despite the publicity given to hackers and their prowess, with such measures in place at online gambling facilities, the greatest security risk lies with the players themselves. Sharing account information with friends and relatives is not to be recommended as the practice is wide open to abuse. More dangerous even than this is the practice of leaving one’s online account running without logging off, particularly in a shared environment such as the workplace.
One useful piece of advice is to choose passwords that consist of both alpha and numeric characters and to avoid the use of names, surnames or birthdays which are readily discoverable by others. Ideally, a password should have some significance known only to you so that it is easy for you to remember but hard for others to guess.
Finally, it is good practice to change your password at regular intervals.
In response to these concerns, online operators have spent enormous amounts of money purchasing and developing the tools to ensure that their clients will consistently enjoy the highest levels of security and privacy that modern technology can provide. All of the top-rated casinos now provide facilities that are guaranteed “state of the art”.
All information that is passed to and from a player’s PC to an online casino as well as that generated during play must be stored for future reference and thus it must be well protected. The first line of defence is normally a firewall. This is a piece of software that can be programmed to listen for and analyse every piece of data passed to or from the server that it monitors. The firewall has strict rules regarding what data may be passed and what must be blocked. Many secure servers employ multiple firewalls as an additional precaution. Firewalls are designed primarily to prevent access by illegal programmes designed to steal data such as user names and passwords or to corrupt it as in the case of viruses. Dedicated anti-virus software is used to supplement firewall defences.
Additional security is required to safeguard sensitive personal data such as credit card or bank account numbers, email and other contact details. For these purposes, all such data is stored in encrypted form that can only be decrypted by legal access to the site using the valid credentials for a specific account. These days, online casinos and poker rooms employ highly advanced encryption techniques and the industry standard is the highest available 128-bit encryption, identical to that employed by the US ministry of defence, the CIA and the FBI.
Despite the publicity given to hackers and their prowess, with such measures in place at online gambling facilities, the greatest security risk lies with the players themselves. Sharing account information with friends and relatives is not to be recommended as the practice is wide open to abuse. More dangerous even than this is the practice of leaving one’s online account running without logging off, particularly in a shared environment such as the workplace.
One useful piece of advice is to choose passwords that consist of both alpha and numeric characters and to avoid the use of names, surnames or birthdays which are readily discoverable by others. Ideally, a password should have some significance known only to you so that it is easy for you to remember but hard for others to guess.
Finally, it is good practice to change your password at regular intervals.