Fake Certificate Puts Google Services Users at Peril of Hacking

Tej Kohli Technology blog warns its readers about a fake web certificate that has been circulating for about two months now. This certificate is letting hackers steal passwords and data from Google sites. Read the detailed report below at Tej Kohli blog.

The certificate which is valid for *.google.com was issued is July by a renowned SSL certificate authority, Diginotar. As per the reports it can be used to carry out “man-in-the-middle” attacks against Gmail and other Google service users.

You may think that you have logged in securely, but the attackers could monitor your key strokes to identify your password and other important data.

This was first brought to notice by a Gmail user in Iran.

“Today, when I tried to login to my Gmail account I saw a certificate warning in Chrome,” wrote Alibo. “I think my ISP or my government did this attack (because I live in Iran and you may hear something about the story of Comodo hacker!)”

Only this year in March, Iran was associated with the fraudulent issue of various SSL certificates from Comodo. Iranian Government was initially believed to be responsible for the attack, until an Iranian hacker claimed the responsibility.

However, this is the first time that a fraudulent certificate is known to have been used in the wild.

“The good news is that the computer security community is now taking this threat very seriously. Unfortunately, the bad news is spectacularly bad: users in Iran (or on any network where an eavesdropper had the key to this certificate) may have been vulnerable for two months,” say Seth Schoen and Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Google announced that it is now marking DigiNotar as untrusted in the next release of Chrome; Mozilla is doing the same in new versions of Firefox, Firefox Mobile and Thunderbird.

Tej Kohli is a technology expert with more than 10 years of experience in the same industry. For more technology updates, keep reading Tej Kohli blog.