At a real-life casino, it can be pretty tough not to be aware of the incredible amount of security that makes sure things are running smoothly. Online, however, most people don’t have advanced knowledge of cybersecurity, and there is no equivalent of catching a security guard running through the pits in your peripheral vision. So, how secure are online casinos, and how can you tell if you should trust one?
Registration
There tend to be gambling authoritative bodies that register a casino, approving it for activities in a region. Getting this approval tends to cost a load of money, so if you can be sure that if the authoritative approval is genuine, then you know the casino is legit.
The harder problem is knowing when the approval is genuine. After all, it’s incredibly easy to plaster a false claim on any website, let alone a fraudulent casino. The only way to be sure is to go directly to the authority and check.
This process can confuse people, so for example, imagine you are gauging the validity of spincasino.com. Navigate to their site and see that they claim to have a Kanawake Gaming Commission certificate. Well, simply visit the Kanawake Gaming Commission website, find the page titled “Authorized Client Providers List by Operator” and scroll down until you see spin casino’s URL. It’s important to match the URL with the site’s URL letter-for-letter, as some clever fraudsters can give their site a similar URL.
Security
Just because a site has good intentions doesn’t mean it is secure. Proper digital security is hard and expensive, encouraging many webmasters to take shortcuts. Even if the site has a proper authority to give them validity, cybersecurity is always changing, and a site has to take every precaution to protect its users’ data and money.
There are two ways of checking this – you can go through their cybersecurity technology statements, or you can rely on third-party testing or auditing.
If you want to look through their technology, keep your eyes peeled for the encryption that they use. SSL encryption is important, and 128-bit SSL technology is a good feature to have. If a site has 128-bit SSL encryption, it means that if a hacker wanted to crack the encryption and access the technology, they would have to test 2128 different combinations.
This means the average hacker would have to spend over 10 quintillion years trying to crack the combination with a normal computer. There are supercomputers that can boil this time down by a few trillion years, but still – without incredibly sophisticated technology, 128-bit encryption is very safe.
If you know much about online security, you will know that most threats don’t come from technology messing up but from humans being manipulated into revealing sensitive information or simply making mistakes. Making sure that the casino you are investigating has a third party to test and audit their practices is always a good idea – and if you want to be extra thorough, you can phone them up and ask what sort of cybersecurity training they provide.
