Users to a number of our sites in the last couple of days may have got a warning that the site was not secure. What this really means is that the security certificate that helps to protect the site from hackers had in fact expired, rather than a breach of security.
A glitch in the renewal process for security certificates meant that 3 domains and websites that we host didn’t get their renewal on the anniversary. Temporarily these domains have been reverted by our diligent admins to point to the https://ourlocality.org/my-own-domain/ to ensure that those over-the-top messages issued by your internet browser don’t get in the way of you or your users, while ensuring your traffic remains ssl secured. The good news? Nothing untoward is going on. The bad news? We will have to wait a few days to get the certificates renewed, but when we do we’ll switch the domains back.
For those with a technical interest in our security, the certificates system has a number of processes to stop abuse including repeated validation failures. We had a wee problem with the latter, that we didn’t spot. Our tech guys are looking into this, and in theory it should not happen again. Apologies to anyone who have been affected.
