JEMC said:
Thanks for the answer. My antivirus, Kaspersky, has updated today and has installed something called Kaspersky Secure Connection, that I'm gonna uninstall right away because I don't like that programs install other programs without at least asking permission first. The screen that appears instead of the blocked site doesn't say much, it only says "Your connexion is not safe" and then "The owner of *insert one of the sites I'm mentioned here* has configured your website incorrectly. To prevent your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website." And then, a link to get more info. I'm going to uninstall that new software and then check the AV program to see if something has changed. |
A quick check tells us that it was indeed Kaspersky. That program works as a proxy and establishes the connection to a website for you. It then relays to you its own certificate or an altered version of the site. The browser will then check the cert and see that the Kaspersky cert and the website do not match and block it. It's especially bad for Firefox users as Firefox uses its own CA database instead of the centralized one in your Windows. It could be that Kaspersky installed its certs onto Windows, which means that with IE/Edge or Chrome you wouldn't have noticed anything.
As my professional opinion it's pretty stupid. While this proxy technology is widely used in enterprises all over the world(like in mine) it's basically useless for home end consumers. It does build a secure connection for you but the browser can do that on its own anyway. It's just another security layer on top of everything else and typically just leads to scenarios just as yours.
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