These days we rarely worry about whether our money is safe in the bank. Gone are the Wild West days of bank stagecoaches braving badlands and bandits, but the Wild Wild Web is a frontier of its own kind, and not necessarily free of its own brand of high-tech bandits and brigands. It’s hard to say how often sensitive data actually gets intercepted on the Web, but when you are sending information online about your money and investments--potentially your life savings--it’s important to know you are as safe as possible.

Your money won’t get ambushed on a dusty plain, but as any sensitive data you send traverses the Internet, your information can potentially be intercepted or monitored at any point along its path. This means that if you want to exchange data securely over the Internet--say between your home computer and your bank--you need to make sure your data is protected.

Internet Explorer is your secret decoder ring
Because Internet Explorer 5 supports the security protocols-- the set of rules and standards that enable computers to exchange information--used by secure sites, you can send information to a secure site knowing your information is protected.

When you visit your bank’s Web site, the site's server automatically sends a digital certificate--essentially an electronic ID card--to prove the bank’s identity and guarantee that the site is secure. This certificate is a collection of binary data that is issued to the bank by a third party called a certificate authority. In addition to proving the bank's identity, the certificate provides a cryptographic “key” that is used to code and decode--thus secure--your communication with the bank.

When you are on a secure site, Internet Explorer 5 displays a lock icon on the status bar. It looks like this:

Encryption decoded
The data you send to secure sites is protected using encryption, which is the process of encoding plain-text data through a special mathematical algorithm. Through encryption, the information you want to transmit securely is scrambled using a secret encryption key, making it appear as garbled text that is extremely difficult to transform back to its original form without the corresponding key. Once your data has been transmitted, it is decoded back into its original form, using a similar key.

When you and your bank are about to exchange encrypted data, a connection is established between your home computer and the bank’s server. The two computers perform a “handshake,” in which the server transmits the bank’s key code to your machine. Your computer then encrypts a unique “session key” using the server’s public key, and for the rest of the transaction, your personal information is encrypted and authenticated using keys derived from this exchange. All this may sound complicated, but Internet Explorer 5 takes care of it for you in a split second.

The more bits, the better
The number of bits supported by your browser translates to how long and complicated (and thus hard-to-crack) the key code used to encrypt your data is. The standard version of Internet Explorer 5.01 supports 56-bit encryption, however you can install a 128-bit High Encryption Pack for even greater security if you bank online. Some financial institutions require the 128-bit version, but even if it is not required, the 128-bit version ensures that you’ll have the most secure connection supported by your bank, and thereby the highest level of protection possible.

With 128-bit encryption, you’ll know that whenever you make financial transactions over the Internet with your bank, brokerage firm, an online merchant, or anyone else who has 128-bit capabilities, your data is encrypted using the most difficult-to-crack code available in the industry today. And since the download costs nothing except for a small amount time, peace of mind has never been so inexpensive.

Mark Reed swears someone must have access to his bank account, the way his money seems to disappear.