The Internet has become a vast marketplace for global goods and services. For e-commerce to prosper, you have to feel safe about transmitting credit card and other financial information. Because data traveling over the network actually passes through many computers along the way, the opportunity exists for someone to intercept confidential information.
Hackers also break into computers to steal stored data.
No one really how often this actually happens. Let's say you want to buy some merchandise from an online store. With the tremendous potential for doing business online, there's a lot of time and money being spent trying to make Internet transactions secure. It's done with a technology called encryption . Encryption software scrambles the data with a secret code so that no one can make sense of it while it's being transmitted.