The NSA released new guidance providing system administrators with the tools to update outdated TLS protocols. The National Security Agency (NSA) is lighting a fire under system administrators who are dragging their feet to replace insecure and outdated Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol instances. The agency this week released new guidance and tools to equip companies to update from obsolete older versions of TLS (TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1) to newer versions of the protocol (TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3). TLS (as well as its precursor, Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL) was developed as a protocol aimed to provide a private, secure channel between servers and clients to communicate. However, various new attacks against TLS and the algorithms it uses have been revealed – from Heartbleed to POODLE – rendering the older versions of the protocol insecure.