“In 2024, we noticed that about half of all certificate requests to the Let’s Encrypt ACME API came from about a million accounts that never successfully complete any validations.”
Half of all Let’s Encrypt certificate requests came from about a million accounts that never pass validation. They are forgotten NAS boxes and servers asking for domains that left years ago. Let’s Encrypt paused over 100,000 of them and about 3% of the owners noticed. The internet is full of machines nobody remembers running.