How do I disable the "Security Certificate Error" message in Internet Explorer?

Question

How do I get rid of this annoying message?

To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has blocked this website from displaying content with security certificate errors. Click here for options.

I tried all kinds of settings on my IE 8 and no luck. I get this from some sites but not all, in particular from the Bank of America.

Solution

You should not want to ignore this message - it is a very important one which helps you identify when your computer is connecting to something which it doesn't trust, or that has a trust level which doesn't match that expected.

For some background have a look at this question on Certificate Chains

If your browser is up to date and you are accessing a valid website (especially a bank) you should not get this sort of message. The fact that you are getting this message could mean one of two things:

• the site admins have messed up the certificate. This does happen on occasion.
• your connection to the website has been compromised. This could be due to a trojan or a man-in-the-middle attack, but you should not trust the connection.

In the first case you could contact the site admins to check whether they need to correct their certificate.

In the latter - you may need to remove malware from your machine, or in the worst case, entirely wipe and rebuild it.

Have a look at the questions tagged certificates over on security.stackexchange.com for more info.

Comments

[Arjan]

Sorry to ask, but since you first posted this on the wrong website: do you know what the message means? And what exactly did you try, after clicking on "click here for options"?

[David Chen]

If you are getting this error from BOFA.com then you might have bigger issues than getting rid of the annoying message, like some sort of redirect malware. Does this happen in another web browser?

[Rory Alsop]

If you want a detailed answer you might even want to migrate to security.stackexchange.com

[JohnEye]

That's not very helpful, now is it? I was experiencing a similar problem with IE10 where I couldn't do anything other than leave the page. This happens when opening a shortcut to a website with certificate error. When you open a fresh instance of IE and navigate to the page, you are then offered to continue to the page at your own risk.