Espionage? Second Web Firm Worried After Dutch Hack

foxnews.com

AMSTERDAM – A company that sells certificates guaranteeing the security of websites, GlobalSign, said Tuesday it is temporarily halting the issuance of new certificates over concerns it may have been targeted by hackers.

GlobalSign, the Belgian subsidiary of Japan's GMO Internet Inc., is one of the oldest such companies globally, and large, but much smaller than industry giants VeriSign and GoDaddy.

It said in a statement it does not know whether it has actually been hacked, but is taking threats by an anonymous hacker seriously in the wake of an attack on a smaller Dutch firm, DigiNotar, that came to light last week.

The DigiNotar attack is believed to have allowed the Iranian government to spy on thousands of Iranian citizens' communications with Google email during the month of August.

Fallout from the Dutch hack continued Tuesday as the Dutch government, which used DigiNotar to authenticate many of its sites, continued to seek replacements.

Meanwhile the Netherlands' national prosecutors said they were investigating DigiNotar, a subsidiary of Chicago-based Vasco Inc., for possible criminal negligence.

The company did not return phone calls seeking comment.

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Hackers steal SSL certificates for CIA, MI6, Mossad

pinewswire.net

The tally of digital certificates stolen from a Dutch company in July has exploded to more than 500, including ones for intelligence services like the CIA, the UK’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad, a Mozilla developer said on Sunday.

The confirmed count of fraudulently-issued SSL (secure socket layer) certificates now stands at 531, said Gervase Markham, a Mozilla developer who is part of the team that has been working to modify Firefox to blocks all sites signed with the purloined certificates.

Among the affected domains, said Markham, are those for the CIA, MI6, Mossad, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft’s Windows Update service.

“Now that someone (presumably from Iran) has obtained a legit HTTPS cert for CIA.gov, I wonder if the US gov will pay attention to this mess,” Christopher Soghoian, a Washington DC-based researcher noted for his work on online privacy, said in a tweet Saturday. Soghoian was referring to assumptions by many experts that Iranian hackers, perhaps supported by that country’s government, were behind the attack.

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