Due to a decision by Google to stop trusting Symantec-issued SSL certificates, users of the Chrome browser will soon receive a security warning when visiting sites secured with a certificate that has Symantec as the Root Certificate Authority.

This includes certificates issued by Symantec’s other brands: Verisign, Thawte, & GeoTrust. For Symantec certificates issued before June 1, 2016, the change will go into effect starting with version 66 of the Chrome browser, scheduled to be released to beta users on March 15th and to all other users on April 17th. For Symantec certificates issued after June 1, 2016 but before December 1, 2017, the change will go into effect starting with version 70 of the Chrome browser, scheduled to be out in October of this year. Mozilla’s Firefox browser is also planning to follow Google’s lead in removing trust in Symantec certificates and is expected to follow a similar timeline. After this decision was made, Symantec sold its SSL certificate business to DigiCert. Because all certificates issued under the various Symantec brand names after December 1, 2017 have DigiCert as the Root Certificate Authority, those certificates are not affected.

So what does all of this mean?

If you have a Symantec-issued certificate securing one of your sites, it will need to be reissued by DigiCert to prevent users of your site from having problems when using Chrome or Firefox web browsers.

If you are a current customer of CTComp and if our records indicate that you have an affected certificate installed in your environment, we will automatically create a service ticket to process the reissue request with DigiCert and subsequently install the new certificate onto your affected system(s). Time to do so will be billed as needed and estimated at approximately 1 hour. Please note that a reissued certificate will have the same expiration date as the original certificate. If your certificate is due for renewal within the next 60 days or so, look for a renewal notice from Jason Cooper rather than an auto-generated ticket for reissue. If you would prefer to not have CTComp do this work for you, simply respond to the “new ticket” email with a cancel request and we will close it out.