Thawte Consulting (pronounced "thought") is a certificate authority (CA) for X.509 certificates. Thawte was founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa. As of December 30, 2016, its then-parent company, Symantec Group, was collectively the third largest public CA on the Internet with 17.2% market share. History Thawte was originally run from Mark Shuttleworth's parents' garage. Shuttleworth originally aimed to produce a secure server not fettered by the restrictions on the export of cryptography which had been imposed by the United States. The server, Sioux, was a fork of the Apache HTTP server; it was later integrated with the Stronghold web server as Thawte began to concentrate more on their certification activities. In 1999, Verisign acquired Thawte in a stock purchase from Shuttleworth for US $575 million. Both Verisign and Thawte had certificates in the first Netscape browsers, and were thus "grandfathered" into all other web browsers. Before Verisign's purchase, they each had about 50% of the market. Verisign's certificate rollover was due to take place on 1 January 2000—an unfortunate choice considering the imminent Y2K bug. (Thawte had a similar rollover in July 1998.) The purchase of Thawte ensured there would be no business loss over Y2K. Proceeds from the sale enabled Shuttleworth to become the second space tourist and to found the Ubuntu project through the creation of the Canonical (company). In August 2010, Symantec acquired Verisign's security business, including Thawte. Thawte is now part of Digicert with its completion of the Symantec web security acquisition. Root certificate untrust Following Thawte's improper issuance of certificates and a dispute with Google the GeoTrust Root Certificate became untrusted. This led to the sale of Symantec's certificate business which included Thawte in August 2017 to Thoma Bravo LLC for $1 billion with the intention of merging it with DigiCert. From 1 December 2017 Thawte started to issue all new Certificates under the DigiCert Trusted Root TLS Certificate. Web of Trust The Thawte Web of Trust was discontinued on 16 November 2009. Thawte used to issue free email certificates and the Thawte Web of Trust was the optional identity verification mechanism for it. To obtain a free Thawte email certificate, a person needed to sign up for a Thawte FreeMail account which allowed a person to create as many certificates as they wanted. Although each certificate was associated with exactly one email address, multiple email addresses could have been associated with