Tuesday morning, we received a number of reports from readers indicating that the SSL certificate used for "settings.adobe.com" was out of date. Initially, we had a hard time reproducing the finding. But some of our handlers in Europe were able to see the expired certificate.

The expired certificate was valid from Oct 6th  2009 to Oct 6h 2010. Which is somewhat unusual. Typically, we would expect a certificate that "just expired yesterday" and someone forgot to renew it. In this case, it looked more like someone installed an older certificate instead of the new one.

The correct certificate was pretty much exactly a year old and valid for another year. Everything indicated that the Adobe certificates indeed expire in the first week of October.

In the end, we narrowed the affected geography down to Europe and contacted Adobe. Adobe responded promptly and as of this evening, the problem appears to be fixed. Thanks everybody who helped via twitter narrowing down the affected geography and thanks to the readers reporting this initially.

------
Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.
SANS Technology Institute
Twitter