Online Trust Alliance Releases Top Recommendations for April Fool's Day

While the internet will be loaded with fun April Fool's Day jokes tomorrow, it's also the perfect opportunity for scammers to come out and take advantage of consumers and businesses. To help you avoid becoming a victim, the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) has published a list of 10 recommendations it suggests businesses follow to protect consumers from being fooled on April 1. Here are five of them:

1. Encourage consumers to update their browsers. Many older versions of browsers don't have integrated anti-phishing, malware protection and online tracking privacy controls, the OTA said. These tools are important given the increase in social media-targeted exploits and use of cloud services.

2. Establish and maintain a domain portfolio monitoring program. This program should include monitoring look-alike domains and tracking renewals to prevent “drop catching” of expiring domains and domain locking to help guard against unintended changes, deletions or domain transfers, the OTA said.

3. Adopt mail authentication. This practice will reduce the incidence of spoofed and forged email, the OTA asserted, helping prevent identity theft and the distribution of malicious malware from tarnishing your brand reputation. 

4. Upgrade to Extended Validation SSL certificates (EV SSL). This is especially important for banking and e-commerce sites that collect personal or financial information, the OTA noted. Use of EV SSL certificates help increase consumer confidence of online brands by turning the address bar green.

5. Continuously monitor third-party code, links and advertising on your site. This practice will help prevent malicious content and ads, the OTA said. In addition, request third-party content providers and ad networks to adopt anti-malvertising guidelines.

• MORE ON
• MANAGEMENT