Back in July 2017, Google announced that they would be removing support for Symantec SSL/TLS certificates from within their own browser Chrome. This applies to companies owned by Symantec too.
Chrome’s early ‘canary’ release has already ended support for these certificates and the beta and production versions are being released during the next month, completing the end of support for Symantec certificates.
If you’re using one of these certificates on your website we would advise that you swap them out immediately as customers using the newer versions of the Google Chrome browser will start to get nasty error messages when visiting any site that has one of these certificates installed.
Why has this happened? Well, to sum it up, it seems like Symantec and their related brand names has issued numerous certificates that did not comply with the industry-developed CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements. During the subsequent investigation, it was revealed that Symantec had entrusted several organizations with the ability to issue certificates without the appropriate or necessary oversight, and had been aware of security deficiencies at these organizations for some time. This essentially meant that there was no trust in the certificates that were being issued making them essentially pointless.