Google released its final SHA-1 deprecation deadlines, and crypto services provider Venafi said that 35 percent of the web is still running weak SHA-1 certificates.

For the first time, more than half of traffic on the Internet is encrypted, and experts say free SSL certificate providers are playing a big role.

Browser makers and other tech companies have gone to great pains to beef up weak crypto libraries, in particular those that are exposed to fallback attacks such as POODLE. Attackers exploiting these vulnerabilities are able to dial back the encryption protecting communication to SSLv2 and SSLv3, for example, forcing servers to fall back to these...

Last year’s Superfish and eDellRoot bloatware mishaps exposed the security nightmare that pre-installed software updaters can create on new laptops. And while these two high-profile incidents made the issue public, they’re hardly isolated cases. Many popular consumer and business laptops from manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus and Acer include bloatware that have a...

The home stretch of Microsoft’s planned SHA-1 deprecation schedule has arrived. This summer, with the planned release of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, users should see signs that the weak cryptographic hash function is being phased out. Microsoft said that once the anniversary update is rolled out, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer will no longer...

All custom domains hosted on WordPress.com will soon have their sites automatically encrypted for free. WordPress said late Friday afternoon that more than one million sites will have encryption automatically deployed. “We are closing the door to unencrypted web traffic at every opportunity,” wrote Barry Abrahamson, chief systems wrangler at Automattic, WordPress’ parent company. WordPress...

The OpenSSL project team today patched two vulnerabilities in the crypto library, one of which is rated high severity and exposes many popular applications to attack. The patches are in new releases of OpenSSL, 1.0.1r and 1.0.2f, along with an enhancement to the strength of the cryptography in a previous mitigation for last year’s Logjam...

If you’re hanging on to the theory that collision attacks against SHA-1 and MD5 aren’t yet practical, two researchers from INRIA, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, have demonstrated new attacks that raise the urgency to move away from these broken cryptographic algorithms. Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaetan Leurent recently published an...

An attacker in a man-in-the-middle position could abuse a STARTTLS downgrade vulnerability in the Cisco Jabber client-server negotiation in order to intercept communication. Cisco warned its customers yesterday, but has yet to patch the vulnerability, which affects the Cisco Jabber clients for Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android. Researchers Renaud Dubourguais and Sébastien Dudek of Synacktiv...