Don't panic, says Blue Coat, we're not using CA cert to snoop on you

A kerfuffle kicked off this week when it looked as though Blue Coat had been made an intermediate certificate authority, backed by root certificate authority Symantec, in September. This would allow Blue Coat to issue security certs for almost any website it wanted – certificates that would be trusted by browsers and apps on computers, phones and gadgets.

Unfortunately, Blue Coat's HTTPS-snooping products have been used by repressive regimes to spy on activists online and quash dissent.

Blue Coat won the "Lamest Vendor Response" Pwnie award at last year's Black Hat security conference. The gong was given after the biz pressured a security researcher into dropping a presentation at the SyScan Conference in Singapore earlier in the year.