ISR News: Experts Hack VeriSign
Excerpt from Computerworld.com’s Robert McMillan
With the help of about 200 Sony Playstations, an international team of security researchers has devised a way to undermine one of the algorithms used to protect secure Web sites - a capability that the researchers said could be used to launch nearly undetectable phishing attacks.
To accomplish that, the researchers said today that they had exploited a bug in the MD5 hashing algorithm used to create some of the digital certificates used by Web sites to prove they are what they claim to be. The researchers said that by taking advantage of known flaws in the algorithm, they were able to hack VeriSign Inc.’s RapidSSL.com certificate authority site and create fake digital certificates for any Web site on the Internet.
Using their farm of Playstation 3 machines, the researchers built a rogue certificate authority that could issue bogus certificates. The Playstation’s Cell processor is popular with code breakers because it is particularly good at performing cryptographic functions.
Filed under: Breach, D&O Liability, Financial, ISR News, Sarbanes-Oxley, Uncategorized, hackers, identity-theft, malware, privacy
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