Thousands of Girl Scouts in North and South Carolina are going green this year – and not only for their vests, sashes and skorts. The color green now signals a safe and secure online shopping experience thanks to advanced solutions from VeriSign, Inc., the leading provider of Internet infrastructure for the networked world, for Girl Scouts, Hornets’ Nest Council.

    The Hornets’ Nest Council is protecting its site with VeriSign Extended Validation (EV) Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates, and that's why Visitors to www.HNGirlScouts.org can be assured that they have not reached a a fake page created by e-criminals to steal credit card numbers and other sensitive information but al egitimate Girl Scout council page.

    When consumers using Internet Explorer 7 visit sites protected with VeriSign EV SSL, the address bar in their browser turns green. This provides an immediately recognizable signal that they’ve reached a Web site they can trust.

    The extended online protections come as Hornets’ Nest Council, which serves more than 14,000 girls in parts of North and South Carolina, launches its “Cookies for the Troops” donation drive. The campaign began in 2002 and has enabled local residents to send more than 125,000 boxes of favorite Girl Scout cookies to military personnel serving overseas. In addition, Girl Scouts, their parents, and volunteers can purchase uniforms and accessories on the EV SSL-secured Web site.

     VeriSign EV SSL technology also enables high-security browsers to display other visual cues, in addition to turning the address bar green, including a lock icon next to the address, and a new field that contains the name of the organization that owns the site as well as the security provider that issued the certificate, such as VeriSign.

    As the most respected and trusted SSL authority on the Web, VeriSign is the EV SSL Certificate provider of choice for more than 2,500 Internet domains, representing greater than 75 percent of the entire EV SSL Certificate market worldwide. In fact, over 93 percent of the Fortune 500 – and the world’s 40 largest banks – rely on some form of VeriSign SSL Certificate to meet their security needs.