How Let's Encrypt made the internet safer and HTTPS standard - and free
Briefly

In 1996, the establishment of websites began with SSL certificates to ensure secure connections. Initially, only a small percentage of websites utilized SSL, despite its importance for online security. In 2010, the vulnerabilities of insecure connections were highlighted, prompting a need for widespread encryption. To make HTTPS more accessible, solutions were sought to simplify the installation process and reduce costs. Three types of SSL certificates are present: Domain Validation, Organization Validation, and Extended Validation, each serving different validation needs.
SSL was then, and is now, the minimum security a safe website should provide to its users. The protocol was also a major pain to set up and expensive to boot.
According to internet security expert Scott Helme, only 6.71% of the million most popular websites were using the security protocol. That was pathetic.
The problem was how to make the process easy, simple to install, and cheap so that people would finally adopt HTTPS.
Since 2010, it was clear that the only way to have reliable security is for every website to be encrypted.
Read at ZDNET
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