Troubleshooting a248.e.akamai.net / DNS is not safe
Having trouble trying to access Gmail, Twitter, or even YouTube? Can’t find a solution and are you tired of suggestions that the time of your computer is to blame?
Do you want to find out if there is any malware that causes the damn DNS problems / possible insecure connection message? We give you a simple solution and a test to quickly resolve this issue.
If you have been suffering for days from the continuous inconvenience of not being able to access your Gmail, or you cannot access youtube/Facebook due to a DNS problem with an irritating message incorporated related to an insecure connection (a248.e.akamai.net certificate problem)
Update 03/12/2018 New Data!
As we suspected, it has been revealed that the reason for this failure is the end of support for SSL / TLS certificates from Symantec.
This process was started by Google Chrome some time ago with certificates issued before June 1, 2016 and will be completed on September 13, 2018 . After this date, all remaining Symantec certificates will stop working, including those issued after June 1, 2016, and will display the error message.
Therefore, from then on, the only solution will be for the affected websites to change their security certificate.
Symantec has enabled an SSL certificate checker to see if your favorite website will be affected. To highlight the text enabled on this website: «Check your website for the distrust of Chrome».
A check that corroborates this protocol change is if we look in this checker for the address “a248.e.akamai.net”. What happens is this:
Remember! The certificates affected by this Chrome compatibility change will be: Symantec, Thawte, GeoTrust and RapidSSL certificates
Solutions
- Check the search engine your browser uses. You could be using Firefox as your browser, and Google as your search engine, for example.
- If you are using Google or Yahoo and you are in Spain, we are sorry to tell you that this could be your problem.
- The solution is as simple as going to your browser settings and changing the affected search engine to any other (Bing, Duck Duck Go…)
Simplified explanation of the Insecure DNS problem and how to check if it is a virus/malware
- First of all, to verify that the problem is with the search engine, we suggest you carry out a test from this link
- If you are trying to connect to your Facebook, Gmail or YouTube account, enter the address of the search engine you are using (Google.es, yahoo.es, bing.es…) and click on “Test web server”.
- The output includes a Heartbleed vulnerability check , which is a security bug in the OpenSSL cryptography library.
What is causing so many problems in relation to a248.e.akamai.net / insecure connection / insecure DNS is possibly a change in protocols that is currently affecting Spain. In this image you can see how, despite indicating security problems, it is observed that there are no vulnerabilities. In a large majority of the cases verified, this incident has been easily resolved by promptly changing the search engine used.
We have not wanted to provide you with technical explanations because the users who are being affected by the DNS insecure connections problem, what they want are solutions to be able to access their Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Gmail accounts again .
For this reason we have gone to the point and tried to explain in a simple way how to resolve messages related to a248.e.akamai.net / DNS not secure and a check so that you can assess for yourselves if there is a risk or it is a specific incident by part of the search engines.
