GlobalSign Awarded WebTrust Seal for Sixth Consecutive Year

Deloitte concludes GlobalSign has completed another successful year as a WebTrust compliant Certification Authority

August 29, 2007; 03:21 AM

LONDON, UK – GlobalSign (www.globalsign.com), one of the longest established Certification Authorities (CA) and specialists in SSL security, today announced that it has received the WebTrust Seal of Assurance for Certification Authorities for the sixth consecutive year after an independent audit conducted by Deloitte.

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The WebTrust Seal of Assurance for Certification Authorities is an audit practice designed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (AICPA/CICA). The WebTrust Seal is only awarded to organisations that upon conclusion of the evaluation have been found by an accredited independent auditor to meet the high standards stipulated by the universally recognised WebTrust program.

During the independent audit, which was performed by Deloitte, several aspects of the organization are examined to check the company complies with the WebTrust criteria. Practices such as customer authentication procedures, physical, network and logical security surrounding the certificate issuance infrastructure, handling of customer data and finally business continuity planning were rigorously reviewed against the WebTrust accreditation criteria. Additional general business practices were also reviewed, including human resource management, asset management and a thorough appraisal of GlobalSign’s legal standing (including the organization’s industry leading warranty plan).

For all Certification Authorities who undertake WebTrust accreditation, the compliance is essential for maintaining the confidence and trust in the services it offers for both its customers, as well as the parties relying on the identity information within certificates issued by GlobalSign. In addition, the audit has become an industry standard in which legitimate Certification Authorities must partake. Operating System and browser vendors such as Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple require the Certification Authority to have obtained WebTrust accreditation in order to be accepted in their respective CA Root Certificate inclusion programs. Such inclusion determines which Certification Authorities are able to issue universally accepted and trusted SSL, code signing and client certificates and also Microsoft or inhouse CA Root Certificate signing activities. For these reasons, GlobalSign opts to undertake an annual WebTrust audit to ensure the high standards employed for over 10 years continue to be monitored and ultimately accredited.

"In today’s security aware society, the WebTrust for Certification Authorities has become the industry’s de-facto standard to assure the wider community that certificates are issued only to properly registered entities. We are very pleased that we could successfully audit GlobalSign for the fifth year in a row," said Carlo Schüpp, Enterprise Risk Services, Deloitte Business Advisory CVBA. "This demonstrates the company’s genuine ongoing commitment to meeting the highest standards and building a brand based on trust and confidence."

In 2002, GlobalSign became one of the first Certification Authorities worldwide to attain the WebTrust compliancy accreditation. GlobalSign’s continued accreditation proves it remains one of the most trustworthy names in the online security and identity authentication world. The WebTrust seal can be clearly seen on the GlobalSign website making it easy for customers to identify that GlobalSign is an accredited site.

"We are once again delighted to be awarded the WebTrust Seal of Assurance. The Seal is a symbol of our dedication to customer needs to have confidence in our certificate issuance practices, processes, information security and privacy," said Johan Sys, Chief Executive Officer, GlobalSign Inc. "We are also committed to passing the new WebTrust for EV accreditation and have already passed the initial WebTrust EV readiness check."

About GlobalSign

Established in 1996 and as a WebTrust accredited public certificate authority, GlobalSign (a GMO Internet Inc group company) offers publicly trusted SSL (standard and new Extended Validation), S/MIME and code signing certificates. These core solutions allow its thousands of enterprise customers to conduct secure online transactions and data submission, and provide tamper-proof distributable code as well as being able to bind identities to client certificates for email security and remote two factor authentication, such as SSL VPNs. It has sales and support expertise available through its US, UK, Japanese and Belgian offices, available in a number of European and Asian languages.

About GMO Internet Inc.

GMO Internet Inc. (CEO Masatoshi Kumagai) is headquartered in Tokyo and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, First Section (Code: 9449). Its Internet based business areas include Internet infrastructure and media. Further details can be found at http://www.gmo.jp/en/ and Mr Kumagai’s profile can be found at http://gmo.jp/en/profile/message.html.

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