Security and feelings of safety are fascinating topics. Individuals rely on security and personal codes all the time for their own needs. Those tasked with the security needs of other people have developed a language for describing many possibilities that may feel unlikely or remote to individuals. A balance of computer and network security defenses must be chosen to take reasonable precautions against security threats without unnecessarily impeding the use of the resources one is protecting. Every day software developers and criminals race against each other to find and fix (or exploit) vulnerabilities in software, often working with others and publishing their results. We entrust our data safety to systems administrators to keep things running smoothly and to both establish and maintain good security practices at all times. For multi-user systems trust and responsibility are shared.

People can view your wordpress or other browsing if they share a network with you by simply listening in. HTTP Secure (HTTPS) encrypts your browsing so it is more difficult to see. Though even this is not guaranteed it is much more secure than not encrypted traffic. Recent headlines about the “heartbleed” vulnerability have brought new attention to software and security. Encryption is warranted when you are providing authentication credentials (like passwords) via your web browser. To setup HTTPS you must obtain a certificate for your server from an authority. Several organizations provide this service for free such as cacert.org and startssl.com. The plugin wordpress-https enables encrypted connections.