Today Facebook announced that it now supports always-on SSL as a user-configurable option. This announcement comes in the wake of recent attention to the possibility of using rogue hotspots to harvest sensitive information from e-mail or social media sites. The issue is that many of these sites use SSL to encrypt the login page, inhibiting the potential theft of logins and therefore accounts, but they fail to offer encyption for the subsequent content that you see when you're inside the site. That's problematic because a man-in-the-middle (MITM) can sit and harvest this information, information that then becomes the basis for a second tier of social engineering attacks. One clear way to become a man-in-the-middle is by operating a rogue hotspot and preying on those who use it to connect to their mail or social accounts. This practice garnered a lot of attention last year with the release of...

As you know, Symantec acquired about half of the VeriSign business in August. That means there's still a significant going-forward concern called VeriSign incorporated, even while a large business (including me) has gone over to become part of Symantec.

As a part of that we've gone through a significant web refresh. The new site makes our association with Symantec clear and segregates the businesses owned by Symantec from the go-forward businesses that are VeriSign Inc. At the same time VeriSign Inc has launched its own independent site as well, complete with its own new brand look and feel.

I'm very pleased to announce that yesterday evening we went live with an important new development in the SSL Certificate industry and a major milestone in the history of the technology. Symantec is now offering full-functioing free trial versions of our SSL Certificates on trusted roots. For many years we've offered a free test certificate version that came with an untrusted root. These certificates are useful for developers who are creating applications, but they don't serve the needs of everyone who would like an SSL trial version. Our new trial versions have trusted roots, which means you can actually stage them in the exact environment you want to run and expect all functionality to work just as they will in final production.

But it gets even better. You can put one of our...

Cyber Monday has traditionally served as a sort of Ground Hog day for holiday shopping, or an early indicator of online sales for the season. Currently, a couple notable arrows are pointing to a very successful online shopping season: sales and seals. While CNN Money reports that Cyber Monday sales are up 20%, I'm happy to report that the number of VeriSign seals viewed on Cyber Monday is up 52% over the same number last year---another record year. We recently announced a new high water mark for overall seals viewed in a single day with more than 500 million. Cyber Monday broke that record as the seal was viewed just under 650 million times. And if we follow the same pattern as last year when Cyber Monday sales and seals viewed were trumped by "Green Monday,...