The Mozilla Foundation plans to reject new digital certificates issued by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in its products, but will continue to trust certificates that already exist.
Microsoft has blacklisted a subordinate CA certificate that was wrongfully used to issue SSL certificates for several Google websites. The action will prevent those certificates from being used in Google website spoofing attacks against Internet Explorer users.
China's rush to the Internet is slowing, with the country adding only 14.4 million new Internet users in the first half of 2014, the lowest half-year growth in eight years.
China's Internet on early Sunday morning suffered a major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that briefly disrupted and slowed access to sites in the .cn domain.
China's Internet populace grew to 591 million by the end of June, as more new users in the country relied on handsets to go online, according to a non-profit research group.