The Risks of Expired SSL Certificates for Your Business

An expired SSL certificate isn’t just a technical oversight, it’s a signal. And it says more about your infrastructure and processes than you might think:

• You’ve lost track of what’s deployed
  Expired certs often reveal forgotten hosts or services still live in production. These hosts don’t receive the scrutiny they need from your teams.

• You’re keeping obsolete infrastructure alive
  Those expired certs usually sit on machines that haven’t been updated and are likely vulnerable. If their SSL certificate is 3 years old, do you really think it’s running patched software and OS?

• You’re not monitoring everything
  If the certificate expired and no one noticed, are you even monitoring that host? An attack may well go unnoticed.

• You may have bad developer practices
  Developers sometimes bypass validation to keep talking to an expired cert. That creates a major attack surface. Google “ignore expired certificate”: 872000 hits.

• You’re wasting energy and money
  You’re serving expired certs on dead endpoints, burning compute for no reason. Cloud compute waste is estimated at 30%!

• You might be failing compliance
  Expired certs are a red flag in PCI DSS, SOC2, and other audits. These audits would cost in the long run far more than good TLS hygiene.

• You’re sending the wrong signal
  It tells customers and partners that security and hygiene aren’t priorities. Public data breaches showcase the lack of preventive measures.

• Now you know your certificates will expire without you noticing
  If it could happen once, maybe your WWW or your payment system is next…

This is why SSLBoard.com helps you spot, prioritize, and clean up your certificate landscape across all your domains, regardless of CA or deployment method.

Illustration by Grok