Is thawte.com legit or a scam?
Thawte is an established certificate authority (founded 1995, now DigiCert-owned) with clean security scans and decades of legitimate business operation.
Analysis Summary
No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site.
MT Intelligence
Thawte.com is the genuine website of a well-known certificate authority with a documented 30-year history. The domain was founded in 1995 in South Africa by Mark Shuttleworth, acquired by VeriSign in 1999, then Symantec in 2010, and integrated into DigiCert in 2017 following industry consolidation. Our antivirus network shows zero malicious detections across 92 engines, and the hosting infrastructure carries no abuse reports. The SSL certificate is valid and issued by DigiCert, the current operator. Independent review sites show mixed but predominantly positive feedback — SSLShopper aggregates 81 reviews averaging 3.1/5 stars with praise for professionalism and ease of use, while Trustpilot shows 2.5/5 from 5 reviews. No scam reports or fraud allegations appear in our web research. The page content, contact information, and external resource loading (DigiCert, Adobe, LinkedIn, YouTube) all align with a legitimate enterprise certificate provider.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for thawte.com, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- thawte.com is the official website of Thawte, a certificate authority founded in 1995, now a brand of DigiCert Inc.
- Thawte was acquired by VeriSign in 1999 for $575 million, then Symantec in 2010, and integrated into DigiCert in 2017 following Symantec certificate distrust issues by Google/Mozilla.
- Site promotes TLS/SSL certificates powered by DigiCert, with access to CertCentral management platform; claims award-winning support.
- SSLShopper aggregated reviews (81 total, ~3.1/5): mix of praise for ease of use, professionalism, and renewal (2014-2017) and complaints about poor customer service, delays (esp. EV certs), and unresponsiveness.
- Trustpilot shows 2.5/5 from 5 reviews; no widespread scam reports found across searches for "scam", "fraud", or "complaint".
- Wikipedia and official pages confirm legitimacy as a long-established CA; historical Web of Trust service discontinued in 2009; no recent major controversies specific to Thawte brand.
- Domain age of ~30 years (11085 days) aligns with founding date; no typosquatting indicators.
- SSLShopper.comopen
"Very professional, and easy for EV SSL. (Denis BUCHER, 2017)"
- SSLShopper.comopen
"Enterprise Account - Never any problems. (Jennifer Crosby, 2015)"
- SSLShopper.comopen
"Favorite SSL vendor. (Andrew, 2015)"
- WHTop.comopen
"Thawte is a solid choice for customers who want trusted SSL/TLS and digital certificate services"
Founded 1995 in South Africa by Mark Shuttleworth; acquired by VeriSign (1999), Symantec (2010), then DigiCert (2017). Now a brand operated by DigiCert Inc. (Lehi, Utah).
Thawte.com is confirmed as the official website of Thawte, a certificate authority founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa. The company was acquired by VeriSign in 1999 for $575 million, then by Symantec in 2010, and integrated into DigiCert in 2017. No scam reports or fraud allegations appear in web-search results or complaint databases. Independent review sites show positive feedback: SSLShopper aggregates 81 reviews averaging 3.1/5 stars, with customers praising professionalism, ease of use, and reliable renewal processes. an independent review aggregator shows 2.5/5 from 5 reviews. Wikipedia and industry sources confirm Thawte's legitimacy and historical significance in the certificate authority space. No recent major controversies or distrust issues specific to the Thawte brand were found.
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Contact Verification
We fetched the page and looked for real-world contact details. Legitimate businesses almost always publish an email on their own domain, a phone number, and a postal address. Scam shops usually don't.
- No email uses the site's own domain — legitimate shops usually do.
- No postal address visible on the page.
- Phone number listed (1.866.893.6565).
- Links to 7 social profiles.
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1301http://thawte.com/
- 2301https://thawte.com/
- 3200https://www.thawte.com/cross-domain
Server Reputation
Still, stay alert
No major threat indicators — but a clean scan does not guarantee every page is safe, and phishing emails routinely spoof real domains.
- Double-check the exact URL in your address bar
Confirm you are actually on thawte.com and not a lookalike like t-hawte.com.com or an IDN homoglyph.
- Use a password manager
Password managers only auto-fill on the exact domain they were saved for — they refuse to fill lookalike domains, which is the single best phishing defence.
- OpenDiscuss this site on the forum
If you have first-hand experience with this site — good or bad — share it with the MalwareTips community.
Reputation Sources
How this domain rates across independent threat-intelligence and blocklist providers.
Referenced Domains
Outbound domains this page links to or loads resources from. Each links to its own security scan.
Safety FAQ
Common questions about this site, answered directly from the scan data above — so the answers always reflect the latest verdict on this page.
- Our automated security review found no threat indicators on thawte.com. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- thawte.com passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 92/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. thawte.com presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by DigiCert, Inc. · DigiCert G5 TLS RSA4096 SHA384 2021 CA1, expiring in 24 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- thawte.com is 30.4 years old, registered on 2/10/1996 through MarkMonitor Inc.. Scam domains are often freshly registered — a site under 6 months old warrants extra caution.
- No. All 92 antivirus engines in our malware network report thawte.com as clean.
- No. thawte.com is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- thawte.com resolves to an IP operated by Incapsula Inc in US (usage type: Content Delivery Network). Hosting location alone doesn't make a site good or bad, but unusual geography for a brand's claimed country is one of many signals we weigh.
- Yes. thawte.com sits in the global top-100k on Cloudflare Radar, which means it has substantial real-world traffic. That does not automatically make it safe, but established brands almost always rank here and throwaway scam domains almost never do.
User reviews & comments(0)
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