Security News > 2020 > February > Let's Encrypt Issued A Billion Free SSL Certificates in the Last 4 Years

Let's Encrypt, a free, automated, and open certificate signing authority from the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, has said it's issued a billion certificates since its launch in 2015.

Since late last year, Let's Encrypt has issued at least 1.2 million certificates each day.

With bad actors abusing Let's Encrypt HTTPS certificates to mask malicious traffic and direct unsuspecting users to malicious sites, the company has taken steps to "Ensure that a certificate applicant actually controls the domain they want a certificate for."

Apple's move to shorten the lifespan of HTTPS certificates means that CA's like Let's Encrypt and ACME clients such as Certbot will only become more valuable going forward, as it would force the website administrators to use a certificate issued for 1 year or less.

How Do Short-Lived Certificates Increase Security? Capping certificate lifetimes improves website security, not least because it reduces the possibility of criminals stealing neglected certificates to mount phishing and malware attacks.

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