Let’s Encrypt announced that it has now secured over 100 million websites and that the figure is still growing. In the last month alone, the number of sites being secured with HTTPS has grown by 24 million. The announcement comes just a day after Chrome decided to inform users that sites without HTTPS are "Not Secure".
Speaking on Let’s Encrypt in general and also on the recent news, the project’s head Josh Aas, formerly of Mozilla, said:
“Expecting every website to enable HTTPS would have been unreasonable prior to the existence of Let’s Encrypt, which lowers financial, technical, and educational barriers to enabling HTTPS. Our focus on ease of use at scale has been a primary driver behind the incredible growth in HTTPS deployment in recent years.
Let’s Encrypt certificates cover over 113M websites today and we are on track to help secure more than 150M websites by the end of 2018. We expect Google Chrome’s new warnings to contribute significantly to that growth, as well as HTTPS growth on the Web in general.”
The news of Let’s Encrypts growth is a sign of good things as it will help protect people from getting hacked when they log in to websites, especially on a public network. Despite the progress, many leading websites are still failing to protect their users.
According to WhyNoHttps.com, most of the insecure websites are based out of China, however, domains such as t.co, wikia.com, bbc.com, foxnews.com, dailymail.co.uk, roblox.com, sberbank.ru, speedtest.net, ladbible.com, ign.com, and asos.com are also insecure.
With Google making the decision to highlight insecure websites, hopefully website admins will start to use tools like Let’s Encrypt to make internet users’ sessions safer for everyone.