One of the first requirements against cybercriminals is the purchase of an SSL certificate for your website. Surfing without HTTPS in the domain name is not a good practice! With the Trust Guard Vulnerability Scan, you can now view and manage the status of your SSL certificates.
SSL secures the communication between your browser and the visited website, so that third parties cannot eavesdrop on the content. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer and is a form of encryption that was developed in 1994 and has long since been replaced by Transport Layer Security (TLS). Nevertheless, everyone on “the Internet” still uses the name SSL because SSL certificates are required to realise this security.
Years ago, surfing on port 80 was simply done under HTTP (so without SSL). Later online forms and credit card fields were protected on an HTTPS address (port 443) for reasons of privacy and security. It is now customary to run the entire website on HTTPS and to refer visitors directly to the https address so that unsafe surfing is no longer possible. An SSL certificate includes the secure domain name, the digital signature, the validity date and the party that issued the certificate, a so-called Third Trusted Party (TTP). The use of self-generated SSL certificates (self-signed) is discouraged.
Management of SSL certificates
If you have to manage the certificates for ten different websites, that takes a lot of time. For each website you have to go through all the details to see if the certificate is still valid and for which (sub)domains it applies. A time-consuming task, in other words. That is why we have added an overview to the Trust Guard dashboard, where you can see all SSL certificates at a glance. To keep it simple, we have made the most important information directly visible:
- For which domain(s) and subdomain(s) is/are an SSL certificate present,
- What is the unique registration number of the certificate, and
- Until when is it valid.
If the status is green, you are currently secure. When it is yellow, you must initiate the renewal process. If it is red, the certificate has expired and you must renew it immediately.The Trust Guard dashboard used to show the security vulnerabilities and the malware status. However, nowadays the dashboard also shows the SSL overview by default no extra cost.
Would you like to know more about our website security scan or do you have any questions about the new SSL overview? Please feel free to contact us at support@trustguard.eu.
