diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index 0270c316e0..eb273782d1 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -1,3 +1,7 @@
+7.1.0-dev.779 | 2024-12-11 12:59:17 -0700
+
+  * Add blurb about Spicy SSL to NEWS (Johanna Amann, Corelight)
+
 7.1.0-dev.777 | 2024-12-11 12:38:48 -0700
 
   * Add Spicy analyzers to Coverity builds (Tim Wojtulewicz, Corelight)
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 7a36130706..3c6a78443f 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -172,6 +172,16 @@ New Functionality
   when doing so as Zeek nodes will not listen on Broker ports anymore, nor will
   they establish a peering to other nodes.
 
+- Zeek now ships with an experimental Spicy-based SSL analyzer, which is
+  disabled by default. This analyzer can be enabled using the
+  ``--enable-spicy-ssl`` conifgure-time option. The Spicy-based analyzer has
+  full support for SSL and TLS, just like the current binpac analyzer. It does,
+  however, not support any version of DTLS. Enabling it will disable DTLS
+  parsing in Zeek.
+
+  The analyzer is currently mostly interesting if you want to experiment with
+  SSL; we do not yet recommend to enable it in normal Zeek deployments.
+
 Changed Functionality
 ---------------------
 
diff --git a/VERSION b/VERSION
index bc872a1c0f..a152f9343a 100644
--- a/VERSION
+++ b/VERSION
@@ -1 +1 @@
-7.1.0-dev.777
+7.1.0-dev.779