It means that the SSL/TLS certificate presented by the domain was issued or signed by a Certificate Authority that is not included in the trusted CA store of major browsers or operating systems. This can indicate the use of rogue or self-created CAs, commonly used in malicious infrastructures.
Three questions every analyst asks before acting on this signal.
It means that the SSL/TLS certificate presented by the domain was issued or signed by a Certificate Authority that is not included in the trusted CA store of major browsers or operating systems. This can indicate the use of rogue or self-created CAs, commonly used in malicious infrastructures.
Because it breaks the global chain of trust that ensures certificate authenticity. Attackers can use untrusted or rogue CAs to impersonate legitimate services, intercept encrypted traffic, or distribute malware under the guise of secure connections.
Analysts should treat such detections as high-severity indicators. They must verify whether the certificate is part of an internal enterprise CA (benign case) or belongs to an unrecognized, suspicious issuer associated with malicious activity or traffic redirection attempts.
A realistic shape of the entry the engine appends to the risk_signals array when this signal fires. Evidence keys are subgroup-default; per-signal overrides documented in the API reference.
{
"slug": "not_trusted_ca",
"name": "Untrusted Certificate Authority (CA) Detected",
"group": "http_crawling_history",
"subgroup": "ssl_behavior",
"direction": "malicious",
"evidence": {
"cert_issued_days_ago": 9,
"issuer": "letsencrypt",
"valid_for_days": 90,
"rotation_count_90d": 3,
"cert_type": "DV"
}
}15 other signals share the same subgroup. They detect related behaviors and often co-fire on the same IOC.
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It means the domain is using an SSL/TLS certificate that was generated and signed by the same entity, without verificati…
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