These certificate companies are responsible for keeping internet traffic safe They use a private key which you can imagine as a combination number lock of 116 digits. This specific company seemed to only be generating numbers that fell in the range of 0 to 256, and at the time of the breach the smallest one was 4. I want you to imagine your data being secured with a lock using a numpad of 116 digits. Now imagine the passcode turned out to be 115 zeros and then 4.