Certificate could not be validated

[Evalee Gress]

I'm the only employee (that I know of) that's getting this error. 

Do different certificates apply to individual employees?

Just trying to understand how the issue seems to be affecting only me.

Thanks.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Woolley [mailto:forums at david-woolley.me.uk] 
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2017 9:00 AM
To: Evalee Gress; support at pidgin.im
Subject: Re: Certificate could not be validated

On 18/05/17 13:30, Evalee Gress wrote:
> Could this be due to a Microsoft update?
>
Most unlikely.  A Microsoft update might remove trust for a root certificate, but the error you are getting is that the certificate is expired.

> When I asked my IT dept. about this, they said they thought it might be due to a Microsoft update. Is that possible?
>

When it comes to security, IT departments shouldn't be guessing! 
However, if you are using the machine for the companies purposes, you can act on their advice to ignore the error, as it is the company's security that is at risk, so they have the right to decide when to ignore warnings.

Certificates have a limited life because of similar reasons to those for which credit and debit cards get replaced.  The longer a particular certificate is in use, the longer the bad guys have to break the encryption.  Also, flaws can be found in the methods used, and new certificates allow believed safer methods to be used; this has actually happened.

If the company doesn't need security for this application, beyond that which applies to the whole network, they should disable encryption, unless the server does not allow that.

> Other than that, they didn't know what could be causing the problem.

The problem is very clear.  They have failed to replace the server certificate before it expired.  I am definitely concerned that the IT department was unable to understand that error.