A free certificate authority “Let’s Encrypt” has revoked millions of Transport Layer Security certificates because of a Certificate Authority Authorization bug. According to their website, over 3 million TLS certificates will have no identity protection due to a Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) bug. The TLS certs revoke was slated for March 4 2020.
Let’s Encrypt says the update will affect close to 2.6% of their publishers which is more than 3 million websites. The accounts affected have been emailed and notified of the latest update. if you didn’t receive an email, it is likely your website is not affected by the update.
According to Threatpost, let’s encrypt said it will give users of its Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates more time to replace 1 million certificates that are still active and potentially affected by a Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) bug before it revokes them.
The non-profit certificate authority explained on its website that the CAA bug is the major reason for revoking licenses.
“when a certificate’s corresponding private key is no longer safe, you should revoke the certificate. For instance, you might accidentally share the private key on a public website; hackers might copy the private key off of your servers, or hackers might take temporary control over your servers or your DNS configuration, and use that to validate and issue a certificate for which they hold the private key. ”
The first step to solving a website certificate revoke is to check for the expiry date. If it is expired, then you can check the backend of your website admin to reactivate it. If it is not expired, you should reach out to your website hosting company to help rectify the issue.
At whogohost, we offer free SSL certificate to our client for shared hosting. We have a promo of 25% off shared hosting for new website owners. Here is a short video below on how to Issue an SSL certificate for your websites through the CPanel.
Despite the certificate license revoke, Let’s encrypt has also issued over 1 billion certificates to new websites. The non-profit certificate authority provides certificates to over 190 million websites all over the world.
