Dear Valued Partner,

I am writing this e-mail to you today to let you know about some very important issues that affect the functionality and trustworthiness of Symantec® SSL Certificates.

In the coming months, SSL Certificates issued by Symantec® will no longer be trusted by the Chrome browser, resulting in a degraded website visitor experience. This move follows Google's decision to stop trusting SSL Certificates issued by Symantec®.

Any website that uses an SSL Certificate issued by Symantec® before June 2016 or after December 2017 will be warned that their connection is not private and someone could be attempting to steal their information. Chrome users will have to click past the warning before they are able to access the website.

The initial change is scheduled to arrive with Chrome version 66, which will launch worldwide on April 17th.

Further, on October 23rd when Chrome launches build 70, all Symantec® SSL Certificates will be listed as untrustworthy

As indicated by Chrome, this incident, while distinct from a previous incident in 2015, was part of a continuing pattern of issues over the past several years that has caused the Chrome team to lose confidence in the trustworthiness of Symantec®’s infrastructure, and as a result, the SSL Certificates that have been or will be issued from it.

Symantec® announced the selection of DigiCert® to run an independently operated Managed Partner Infrastructure (MPI), as well as their intention to sell their PKI business to DigiCert®. Shortly after, Symantec® purchased a stake in DigiCert® and since December 1st, all Symantec® SSL Certificates have been issued by DigiCert®.

As one of Symantec®'s largest partners, we have been significantly affected by this issue and a range of ongoing issues over the past few years and months, that as of today, unfortunately, continue to be disruptive. We have experienced a range of significant issues over the past few months that have directly impacted our business, partners and customers.

Our goal is to ensure that all our valued partners have reliable and trustworthy SSL Certificates, and in the interests of our partners, we have now begun a process in order to ensure that all SSL Certificates that are issued, are reliable and function as intended.

In view of the above, effective 9th February 2018, Trustico® will cease to offer the following Symantec® brands : Symantec®, GeoTrust, Thawte and RapidSSL. Our website will be updated today to reflect a change in the products that we offer.

As a valued partner of Comodo®, we have updated our systems to minimize disruption with our API and ordering processes by enabling the automatic selection and ordering of equivalent products from the Comodo® range. This means that if you attempt to order a SSL Certificate we no longer supply, you will be presented with an alternate trusted product.

Additionally, we will soon launch our new website trust seals and will be offering Trustico® branded SSL Certificates across our sites. Over the next few days we will be progressively enabling the Trustico® branded SSL Certificates within all partner accounts and will send you further updates and notifications.

We encourage all partners to update their API’s to ensure that they can order trusted products from the Comodo® and Trustico® range.

As each partner has different requirements we welcome you to contact us with your questions and to assist with the management of your partner account. We'll be adding some new features to your account shortly.

We understand that the issue surrounding Symantec® and the resulting changes are disruptive. The changes that we are making are important and we will continue to act to ensure all products and services that we offer are reliable and fit for purpose.

If you have active Symantec® SSL Certificates, we'll be contacting you during the next week to let you know how you can benefit by replacing them free of charge and to also let you know about some new benefits and incentives that we'll be including on your account for your continued loyalty.

Kind regards,

Zane Lucas
Trustico® by Red 16, Inc.
Director