Except it is INSECURE: > However, insecure downgrades are called insecure for a reason. Client downgrades are triggered by a specific type of network failure, one that can be easily spoofed. From the client’s perspective, there’s no way to tell if this failure was caused by a faulty server or by an attacker who happens to be on the path of the connection network. This means that network attackers can inject fake network failures and trick a client into connecting to a server with SSLv3, even if both support a newer protocol. At this point, there were no severe publicly-known vulnerabilities in SSLv3, so this didn’t seem like a big problem. Then POODLE happened.