Over the past year, our industry has seen an increase in threat actors attempting to use remote management tools like PDQ — and many of our peer companies — to carry out malicious activities.
The security and trust we provide to users is at the heart of what we do, and so we’re proactively enacting some precautions to ensure a reliable and continuous experience with our products.
Here are some pertinent updates to be aware of as we roll these changes out:
Rotating certificates for current customers
As part of our ongoing commitment to security and reliability, we’ve rotated the certificate used to validate our products. PDQ customers’ certificates will be revoked by October 18, 2025. Once that occurs, older versions of PDQ software signed with this certificate may no longer launch or install correctly.
If you’re a PDQ Deploy and/or PDQ Inventory customer or user:
Download the latest versions:
In the lower-right corner of Deploy or Inventory, click A new version is available, or
Log in at portal.pdq.com to grab the latest installers.
Run the installers to update your products.
Restart your PDQ services or console to activate the new certificate.
If you’re a SmartDeploy customer or user:
Update to the latest version of SmartDeploy as soon as possible:
From the SmartDeploy Desktop Console, select Update available.
Or, log in at app.smartdeploy.com to download the latest version.
Once downloaded, run the installer to update.
Update SmartDeploy clients to the latest version:
From Computer Management, select the client devices and Update Client.
If you’re a PDQ Connect customer or user:
Connect agents will automatically update to version 5.10.5 or later in the background — no action is required as long as devices remain connected to the network. If the agent has not been updated to v5.10.5 or later by October 18, 2025, the agent will need to be manually reinstalled. If you’re in an all-signed environment, you’ll need to add the new PDQ certificate to your Trusted Root CA Store so your deployments keep running smoothly.
Increased scrutiny for trials and self-service purchases
As our industry has seen, free trials are the entryway for many of the threat actors who trigger the false positives affecting our tools.
As a result, all future trials and self-service purchases will encounter additional verification steps to access our products and run particular tasks. These changes are in line with ones rolled out by our peer companies. No current customers are affected by these changes. We believe these changes, though at times slightly annoying, will help us to drastically diminish the number of threats we face.
What comes next
Threat actors look for ways to abuse legitimate management tools. The updates outlined here are precautionary measures to maintain the highest levels of safety and security. These updates will help ensure that PDQ products can only run in trusted environments.
For additional information, please view this support document. Should you have further questions, our support team is standing by to help you through this process: support@pdq.com.
