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Microsoft applications taken down by expired certificate

Microsoft applications taken down by expired certificate

Find yours before they impact your business

With the recent news of the worldwide outage for Windows 11 users, it’s a stark reminder to all engineers about how an expired certificate can take entire systems offline.

On November 1st, the company issued a warning that several features in Windows 11 were failing to load due to a certificate that expired on October 31st. As a result, some users weren’t able to open and use apps such as the Snipping tool, touch keyboard, or emoji panel. 

In this case, a patch was soon made available that fixed a majority of the issues replacing the expired certificate. 

This highly public outage only reinforces the importance of finding expired certificates before they create business impact. While the Microsoft expired certificate problem is annoying and can be time-consuming, the problem of expired certificates represents a far greater risk to business when IT organizations are not on top of it. A typical IT organization can have dozens to hundreds of certificates and when they expire, they take down the services along with them.

Keeping track of certificate renewals with an up-to-date inventory is a priority for IT leaders, but it can be a difficult task. In fact, as this example shows, it can be so tricky that it can trip up one of the largest software companies in the world. 

Fortunately, Device42 automates discovering and managing certificates.

Device42…

  • Autodiscovers certificates by IP range, in bulk, or from a URL
  • Manages all certificates in a chain
  • Provides a complete inventory of all your TLS/SSL certificates
  • Notifies you before certificates expire
  • Features visual heat maps to see time to renewal at a glance
  • Ensures FIPS-140-2 compliance with cipher suite audits and algorithm reporting
  • Relates devices to certificates and shows which devices need to be updated.
  • Tracks your purchase orders, costs etc. around certificates

Device42 also allows you to create and use custom fields to keep track of certificates by your own criteria. 

See for yourself how it works. Register for a live demo and download a trial version to learn how Device42 can help you. 

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Rock Johnston
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