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Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
UPDATE: A day after suspending the issuance of SSL certificates while it investigates claims that its certificate authority infrastructure was compromised, GlobalSign said that the investigation is still ongoing but that it planned to begin bringing some of its services back online on Monday.
As GlobalSign continues the investigation into the claimed compromise of its CA infrastructure, the attacker who says he breached DigiNotar and Comodo said in another message on Pastebin Wednesday that not only did he hack GlobalSign, but he has the private key used to sign the certificate for the company’s own domain as well as backups of its databases.
GlobalSign, a major certificate authority that was named by the hacker who has claimed credit for the DigiNotar hack as another CA he has compromised, has stopped issuing certificates for the time being while it investigates the claims and determines whether its network has in fact been compromised. It also has hired Fox-IT, the same company that investigated the attack at DigiNotar, to perform the audit of its systems.
The fallout from the DigiNotar compromise continued on Tuesday, as Microsoft said it has now revoked its trust of all five of the certificate authority’s root certificates. The update that makes this change is being pushed out to users on all supported versions of Windows. Mozilla also released new versions of Firefox on Tuesday that revoke trust for all of DigiNotar’s certificates.
A new report on the security of DigiNotar paints an ugly picture of the certificate authority’s safeguards and network infrastructure, showing that the company had all of its CA servers on one Windows domain and likely failed to separate the critical components on its network, making it easy for the attacker to make his way around the network and into the critical CA servers.
The same attacker who claimed to have compromised Comodo in March is now claiming responsibility for the attack on DigiNotar, the Dutch certificate authority that issued fraudulent certificates for several hundred domains in he last few weeks, including Google, Yahoo, Mozilla Add-Ons and several intelligence agencies. In the wake of the widening scandal, the Dutch government has performed an audit of the company’s CA business and browser vendors have revoked trust for the certificates DigiNotar issued for the Dutch government’s PKI.
The disturbingly complete compromise of DigiNotar, the Dutch certificate authority, has broad ramifications for other CAs, enterprises and consumers who rely on the shaky web of trust that comprises the CA system. Here’s what you should know about the attack and what you can do to protect yourself against intrusions resulting from it.
There are a lot of things in the security world that are broken and there isn’t room to list them all, even on the Internet. But if the events of the last few days have shown us anything, it’s that the certificate authority infrastructure is beyond broken and there’s no quick fix looming on the horizon. In fact, the way things look now, there may not be any practical solution to the problem at all.
The attack that compromised some high-value servers belonging to kernel.org–but not the Linux kernel source code–may have been the work of hackers who simply got lucky and didn’t realize the value of the servers that they had gotten their hands on. The attack, in short, could have been far worse.
Attackers have compromised a number of servers at kernel.org that house the Linux kernel source code and were able to modify a number of files and log user activity on the machines. However, it appears right now as though the Linux source code repositories were not affected by the attack.
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