| Type | Private company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet security, Public key infrastructure |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Headquarters | Eilat, Israel |
| Key people | President & CEO: Eddy Nigg |
| Website | www.startcom.org |
StartCom is a company based in Eilat, Israel that has three main activities: StartCom Linux Enterprise (Linux distribution), StartSSL (Certificate Authority) and MediaHost (Web hosting).
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StartCom offers the free Class 1 X.509 SSL certificate "StartSSL Free", which works for webservers (SSL/TLS) as well as for E-mail encryption (S/MIME). It also offers Class 2 and 3 certificates as well as Extended Validation Certificates, where a comprehensive validation (with costs) is mandatory.
In June, 2011, the company suffered a data breach which resulted in StartCom suspending issuance of digital certificates and related services for several weeks.[1]
In contrast to CAcert.org, which also offers free Class 1 SSL certificates, the StartSSL certificate is included by default in Mozilla Firefox 2.x and higher, in Apple Mac OS X since version 10.5 (Leopard), all Microsoft operating systems since 24 September 2009,[2][3] and Opera since 27 July 2010.[4] Since Google Chrome, Apple Safari and the Internet Explorer use the certificate store of the operating system, all major browsers include support for StartSSL certificates.