The purpose of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol is merely to encrypt the data packets sent between your computer and the target site. As Tony points out, it does not guarantee the integrity of that site.
If you want to get an idea of how many hops a packet takes and where it travels, try running a trace route on your windows or Mac system. In Windows, open up a DOS command prompt window and enter the following: tracert websiteurl (where websiteurl is the name of a target site of your choice such as google.com).
What you’ll see is a hop by hop reporting of the route your packets take to get to the target site. Consider that any unscrupulous person, at any of those intermediate hops, with a laptop and free packet sniffer software can connect to the LAN at that hop site and capture and view the data inside the packets including credit card information and passwords. But packets traveling over the Internet encrypted with SSL cannot be deciphered and are useless to the interceptor.
Regarding using your credit card over the Internet, I just posted a new thread called "Safest way to shop on-line using your credit card" in the general forum. Give it a look for my recommendation on that.
|