EOnce upon a time, I set out to buy an HP Spectre x360 laptop. It didn’t go well, and the issues I encountered offer a lesson in what to look for when making purchases online.
The first red flag went up when the computer was added to the shopping cart at hp.com. At least HP uses a secure shopping cart, many sites do not.
But, I immediately noticed that the cart uses a Domain Validation (DV) certificate. This was also true throughout the checkout process.
Digital certificates are a large part of what makes a secure web page/site secure. A certificate is a file that the website provides the browser. Certificate files serve two main functions, encryption and authentication. Authentication, in this context, refers to the trust that store.hp.com really belongs to Hewlett-Packard.
