We all benefit from the extraordinary variety of websites on the internet. Entertainment, information, inspiration, services, and more are available in seemingly endless supply. Unfortunately, not all websites are benign. Just like in the real world, there are shady businesspeople, criminals, and organized crime. For example, online banking users might be lured to a fake website so that their access information can be stolen. As another example, someone might install a public WLAN hotspot to secretly intercept communication taking place.
Initially, all data traffic on the World Wide Web was handled openly in plain text and could be easily hacked. The HTTP protocol deals with the communication between the client (i.e. the web browser) and the web server without encryption. This makes criminal activities such as spying on metadata and man-in-the-middle attacks easier.
HTTPS was developed to make the web more secure. Here you will learn what HTTPS is and how it works.