F5 Labs 2019 TLS Telemetry Report Summary

Encryption standards are constantly evolving, so it is important to stay up to date with best practices. 

The 2019 F5 Labs TLS Telemetry Summary Report by David Warburton with additional contributions from Remi Cohen and Debbie Walkowski expands the scope of our research to bring you deeper insights into how encryption on the web is constantly evolving. We look into which ciphers and SSL/TLS versions are being used to secure the Internet’s top websites and, for the first time, examine the use of digital certificates on the web and look at supporting protocols (such as DNS) and application layer headers.

On average, almost 86% of all page loads over the web are now encrypted with HTTPS. This is a win for consumer privacy and security, but it’s also posing a problem for those scanning web traffic. In our research we found that 71% of phishing sites in July 2019 were using secure HTTPS connections with valid digital certificates.

This means we have to stop training users to “look for the HTTPS at the start of the address” since attackers are using deceptive URLs to emulate secure connections for their phishing and malware sites. 

Read our report for details and recommendations on how to bolster your HTTPS connections.