20110829 : DigiNotar issues a wildcard certificate under the name of Google

Google has been the victim of a MITM (Man In The Middle) attack during several weeks because of a fraudulent certificate issued by DigiNotar, a company of the group Vasco Date Security.

This is a wildcard certificate for *.google.com that has been used to divert the internet traffic of Google (Gmail in particular) from several internet access providers. No doubt that the goal was to have access to the e-mail exchanged by the opponents of the government in power.

The scheme has been discovered on august 27 and the main browsers editors (Microsoft, Firefox, Chrome) have decided to revoke the root certificate of this authority. Mozilla explains how to suppress this authority now.

On August 30, the company admitted to have been the victim of an intrusion in its certification infrastructure that has been detected on july 19. At this date, they have ordered an audit and revoked the certificates issued fraudulently except from the Google certificate... One can wonder how such oblivion could take place, knowing that DigiNotar issues a few number of certificates and mostly for the NL market.

On September 5, has been claimed by the hackers already guilty of attacking Comodo Resgistration Authorities during the previous spring.