Hello, welcome to the Monday, January 14th, 2019 edition of the Sands and its Storm Centers.

Stormcast, my name is Johannes Ulrich, and today I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

If you are running into any U.S. federal government websites with expired TLS certificates. This may be due to the shutdown

of many federal government offices. The shutdown left some sites unmaintained. You should

still not accept these certificates and avoid the sites if at all possible. Also keep in mind that while these audio certificates are likely just a harmless misconfiguration,

there is always a chance that malicious actors are taking advantage of the confusion.

While I do not believe.gov websites usually use lets encrypt.

The ACME protocol lets encrypt uses to automate certificate maintenance could actually help in situations like this to keep certificates renewed.

And of course, we have seen it multiple times in the past where certificates did expire just because someone forgot to set their

calendar alert to renew them. Automating this is always a nice option. And have you migrated

all your Windows 7 systems to Windows 10 yet? If not it may be time to come up with a transition plan.

Windows 7 will reach end of life one year from today.

It's actually in the extended maintenance period right now.

One year from today you will not even receive security patches for Windows 7 anymore unless you

pay Microsoft special extended, extended maintenance fee.

Now Windows 7 hasn't been for sale since October 2016 and it was only with new systems.

So hopefully by now you have gotten around to at least go to a Windows 8.1 that gives you another two years or so.

But if you still have Windows 7 systems, well move to Windows 10 right away.

And by the way, this is also the last year for Adobe Flash. Adobe announced that it will discontinue support for Flash in 2020. Firefox

will actually disable Flash by default in version 69, which will be released in September.

So in case you have still some of these old Flash websites sitting around, you got about a year to convert them to H-Tml5 or some other

more modern technology. And the security researcher using the Twitter handle FFF-F-080-0

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