Visitors to this bank Website remain anonymous. We do not collect identifying information about visitors to our site. We may use standard software to collect non-identifying information about our visitors, such as:

• Date and time our site was accessed
• IP address (A numeric address given to servers connected to the Internet)
• Web browser used
• City, state, and country

The bank uses this information to create summary statistics and to determine the level of interest in information available on our site.

Visitors may elect to provide us with personal information via E-mail, online registration forms, or our guest book. This information is used internally, as appropriate, to handle the sender's request. It is not disseminated or sold to other organizations.

Some areas of our Website may use a "cookie" temporarily stored in the visitor's computer memory (RAM) to allow the web server to log the pages you use within the site and to know if you have visited the site before.

This Internet Banking System brings together a combination of industry-approved security technologies to protect data for the bank and for you, our customer. It features password-controlled system entry, a VeriSign-issued Digital ID for the bank's server, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol for data encryption, and a router loaded with a firewall to regulate the inflow and outflow of server traffic.

To begin a session with the bank's server the user must key in a Log-in ID and a password. Our system, the Internet Banking System, uses a "3 strikes and you're out" lock-out mechanism to deter users from repeated login attempts. After three unsuccessful login attempts, the system locks the user out, requiring either a designated wait period or a phone call to the bank to verify the password before re-entry into the system. Upon successful login, the Digital ID from VeriSign, the experts in digital identification certificates, authenticates the user's identity and establishes a secure session with that visitor.

Once the server session is established, the user and the server are in a secured environment. Because the server has been certified as a 128-bit secure server by VeriSign, data traveling between the user and the server is encrypted with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol. With SSL, data that travels between the bank and customer is encrypted and can only be decrypted with the public and private key pair. In short, the bank's server issues a public key to the end user's browser and creates a temporary private key. These two keys are the only combination possible for that session. When the session is complete, the keys expire and the whole process starts over when a new end user makes a server session.

Requests must filter through a router and firewall before they are permitted to reach the server. A router, a piece of hardware, works in conjunction with the firewall, a piece of software, to block and direct traffic coming to the server. The configuration begins by disallowing ALL traffic and then opens holes only when necessary to process acceptable data requests, such as retrieving web pages or sending customer requests to the bank.