Steve Heffernan’s Blog

Flying to TX tomorrow to see my new niece, and needed a place to park near Ontario Airport. I clicked the first search result, “Park ‘n Fly”, and it looked decent enough. I set up my reservation, put in my credit card info, and after hitting submit I realized I wasn’t on a secure page! I used to be really good about checking for that, but up to this point I’ve never seen a site that didn’t use a secure page on a form, especially when accepting credit cards, so I got lazy. Some web developer out there needs to be slapped. Here’s the unsecured site.

If you don’t know, you can tell a page is secure by the “https” instead of just “http” in the web address. If a page isn’t secure, your information is being sent through the web as clear text, so somebody watching the signals in the tubes can steal your info.

Here’s a pic of the offending site that does not have the “https” yet is requesting CC info. Technically if this page submitted to a secure page it would be okay, but it doesn’t. I didn’t feel like buying more parking to show the really bad page.

So after seeing this I looked for some contact info where I could let somebody know of the security hole. I found a “contact us” link at bottom, and it didn’t work! In fact none of the links in the footer worked. I’m not sure why I was surprised. The links pointed to “#”, which is kind of a place holder address where you’ll put something later.

So dumb…

I received this email the very next day:

Mr. Heffernan,

This has been fixed. Thank you for your feedback and because of our
feedback on this issue we have asked our Marketing Department to fix the
problem and today, they did announce that is now secure with https.
Thank you for remaining a loyal customer!

Thank You, 

Alexis Torrence 

Park N Fly Headquarters
Frequent Parker Program
 

So yeah, pretty quick response time. I’m impressed. I didn’t think that would actually work. I checked and the security issue has been fixed. The footer links are still broken, but that’s a minor issue in comparison. Not bad Park ‘N Fly. For that I’ll give you an SEO link: Airport Parking