Tens of millions of smartphones collectively offline? The culprit is.
Recently, Swedish multinational network and telecommunications company Ericsson caused a large number of customer service disruptions due to the use of expired security certificates, which directly affected the network connections of tens of millions of users around the world. On December 6th, international telecom operators O2 and SoftBank (in the UK and Japan respectively) became important victims of this mistake, bringing some losses to enterprises.
What on earth happened?
Ericsson is the back-end equipment manufacturer of many world-famous cellular networks. A flaw in Ericsson's management software disrupted the network services of two telecom providers, O2 and SoftBank. After further analysis of the problem, Ericsson found that the root cause of the software failure was the use of expired security certificates, which affected many core network nodes and caused communication power outages.
The power outage began at about 01:39 on Thursday morning, and Softbank Corp. 's Internet users lasted about five hours. O2 users faced power outages when 3G networks were restored between 5am and 09:30 GMT on Tuesday. The company reported that the 4G network was restored at 3:30 on Friday.
After research and discussion, this solution involves reissuing certificates to all affected nodes, and then manually updating the software for each node. This remedy is also no small challenge, but it is the only way to solve the problem. In order to reduce the negative impact and rebuild its credibility in the market, O2 will compensate all affected customers.
How to prevent trouble before it happens? Initiative is the key!
Security certificate update is not a very complex technology, but it is very critical. While ensuring continuous service uptime, it is also important to track and manage the life cycle of security or SSL certificates deployed to your software or Web applications.
Updating security certificates is a huge responsibility for IT administrators, especially large organizations that deploy thousands of SSL certificates on hundreds of servers. Imagine having to manually discover all active SSL certificates in your organization, keep a close eye on their usage, and renew certificates that are about to expire without missing a single certificate. The work of managing certificates manually is very complicated and error-prone.
In terms of certificate renewal, you must take the initiative. Everyone makes mistakes, but when it comes to business, you can't let one oversight undo all previous efforts.
You need-the best solution!
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