When browsing the Internet, it is very likely that on some occasion we have come across an error message, which tells us that the identity of a website or the integrity of the connection cannot be verified when trying to open a web page. . In this chaos it is an attempt by Windows to warn us that the website we are trying to visit has some discrepancies with its certificate.
When we receive a security alert, we may get a good scare, especially when they are displayed randomly in both Windows 10 and Windows 11. Although many of them are displayed when we try to access an untrusted website , it can also be interpreted as a signal in case of a malware attack.
What prevents verifying the identity of a website
While browsing the internet and trying to access a website, we may come across the error “The identity of this website or the integrity of this connection cannot be verified”. This is something that can surprise us, and that can be caused by different reasons, especially related to the digital certificate, such as:
- The digital certificate of a website has expired: This fact is quite common when we talk about old web pages that have no longer been updated and have become obsolete. This message mainly arrives through our web browser or with programs that execute scripts that involve it.
- The details on the certificate do not match: This time the warning message is nothing more than an attempt by the operating system to inform us that it has found certain discrepancies with the website we are trying to access.
- The security level is set to High: This is something that usually happens when we use our Microsoft Edge browser with a security level set to High.
- The message may be caused by malware: There may be malware that will interfere with your web browser and show us this warning message as a scam, since it will make us think that it is a message from the system itself.
The identity of this website or the integrity of this connection cannot be verified is actually a common security alert that is usually caused by a security certificate issue. However, we cannot simply identify the cause at a glance, so it will be necessary to cover several solution models to choose the right one to fix the problem.
Troubleshooting steps
Next, we are going to see different actions that we can carry out to avoid the appearance of the warning message “The identity of this website or the integrity of this connection cannot be verified”.
Try to resolve the security alert message
Along with the appearance of the message, we are offered three options, Yes, No or View digital certificate. If it is a site that we visit frequently and we trust it, then we can click on the Yes option to indicate that we trust despite not being able to verify your identity. In the event that we are trying to visit an unknown site, then it is best to click on the No option, while we can select the View certificate option if we want to check the details and decide whether we want to continue or not.
While this should resolve the issue, the error may return momentarily or on the next system boot. If this is our case, we move on to try other solutions.
Disable identity verification for all websites
To deactivate these messages we must access the Control Panel and select its Internet Options section.
Later we click on the Advanced Options tab and in the list of configuration options, we move to the bottom, right to the Security section. Here, we must search and mark the options «Check if the publisher’s certificate was revoked» and “Check if the server certificate was revoked» and uncheck them. To finish, click on Apply and from that moment we will not be shown the message again when verifying the identity of a web page.
Add the website to a white list
However, disabling identity verification for all websites may not be a very wise measure because we will not be notified of websites that are not secure, so the ideal is to choose to keep the configuration activated, but deactivate it for a specific page.
To do this, from the Internet Properties window itself, click on the Security tab and check the option Trusted sites. Next, click on the button sites and we add the website for which we want to disable the site identity verification message, since it is a trusted website that we already know. We save the changes and from that moment we will no longer see the error screen when visiting that web page, but we will see it for the rest of the non-secure sites.
Lower the security level of the browser
Another way to try to solve the problem is to reduce the security level of the browser when we use Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge. In the event that we have it configured at a High level, we must try to change it to a Medium security level.
To do this, we access the Internet Options, pressing the keyboard shortcut Windows + R which will enable the Run command. Here, we type inetcpl.cpl and hit Enter. Later we access the security screen. Here we check the section Security level for this zone and set it to Means, medium. Click on Apply and OK to save the changes and restart the computer. Once restarted we check if the problem “The identity of this website or the integrity of this connection cannot be verified” disappears when visiting web pages.
Remove browser extensions
The appearance of this error may have been caused by malware that has been installed in our browser through an extension, so we must eliminate it.
Google Chrome
We open the browser and press the keyboard shortcut Alt + F to open a menu where we choose the Tools option and click on Extensions. Next, we remove any recently added extensions that may have been added by the malware.
MozillaFirefox
We open Firefox and press the keyboard shortcut Shift + Ctrl + A to open its Extensions section. Here we must check the last installed extension that has inserted the malware causing the warning banner “The identity of this website or the integrity of this connection cannot be verified” to appear and remove it.
Microsoft Edge
We open Edge and press the keyboard shortcut Alt + T. Then we click on Manage add-ons. We go to the Toolbar and extensions. From here we select the malicious extension that has been added to the browser. We choose More information and click Delete.
