Website certificates that expire every six weeks? What IT should know – Computerworld

Even worse, most domain name registrars do not have a mechanism for canceling a name that has already been paid for. The registrar simply tells the company, “Make sure it doesn’t automatically renew and don’t renew it later.”

When bad guys find these abandoned sites, they can take over them and try to use them for illegal purposes. Thus, it is argued that the shorter the validity period of a site’s certificates, the less of a security threat it poses. This is one of those arguments that seems quite reasonable on the board, but it doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground.

Reducing the time frame could reduce the number of such attacks, but only if the time frame is so short that it denies attackers enough time to commit their evil. And according to some security experts, 47 days is still plenty of time. Thus, these attacks are unlikely to be significantly reduced.