GeoTrust

The pre-2001 GeoTrust was focused on the B to B exchange market which never materialized. GeoTrust became one of the few startup dotcom companies able to restart in a new direction and to achieve a successful outcome. With GeoTrust's history, several individuals had the title of co-founder. There are founders of the old GeoTrust which started in 1999 and founders of the restarted company in 2001. These may be viewed as two distinct companies with the same name in completely different businesses.[2][3] GeoTrust was the first certificate authority[4] to utilize the domain-validated certificate method[5] US Granted 8028162, Douglas D. Beattie & Christopher T. M. Bailey, "Methods and systems for automated authentication, processing and issuance of digital certificates", published September 27, 2011, assigned to GeoTrust which is now widely accepted and used by Let's Encrypt. [6][7] GeoTrust was a restarted company in 2001 that acquired the security business of Equifax. The Equifax business was the basis of its fast growth. The founders of the restarted company were CEO Neal Creighton, CTO Chris Bailey and Principal Engineer Kefeng Chen.[8] Having no previous fund raising experience Creighton, Bailey and Chen used an existing (almost bankrupt) company as the vehicle to acquire the business they had started at Equifax.[9] The buyout of the Equifax certificate business was inexpensive given the final exit price in 2006.[10]

VeriSign acquired GeoTrust on 5 September 2006 for $125 million. The main investor was St. Paul Venture Capital/VesBridge. ACG/ Mass High tech named VeriSign's acquisition of GeoTrust as the sell side deal of the year for 2006.[10]

Symantec acquired the GeoTrust brand in 2010 as part of its $1.28 billion acquisition of Verisign security business.[11]

Symantec announced the sale of its entire certificate business in August 2017 to Thoma Bravo LLC for $1 billion[1] with the intention of merging it with DigiCert[12].

Following a dispute with Google the GeoTrust Root Certificate became untrusted.[13]

• On July 27, 2017, Google posted a plan regarding Symantec-issued (GeoTrust) TLS server certificates with Intent to Deprecate and Remove:
  • December 1, 2017; all GeoTrust certificates must be issued from a new PKI infrastructure in order for such certificates to be trusted in Google Chrome.
  • On March 15, 2018; Google Chrome will show a warning for sites secured with SSL/TLS certificates issued before June 1, 2016.
  • On September 13, 2018; Google Chrome will show a warning for sites secured with SSL/TLS certificates issued by Symantec’s existing PKI infrastructure.

Beginning 1st December 2017 GeoTrust has been issuing all Certificates under the DigiCert Trusted Root TLS Certificate. [14]

• Official website