The Internet goes on high alert after discovery of 8 compromised TLS certs

Security personnel around the world are on high alert Tuesday following the discovery of eight TLS certificates with private keys so weak they could allow anyone to mint trusted browser and app credentials for any site on the Internet. As of late morning Tuesday, browser makers and some major apps and programming languages had blocked all eight of the intermediate certificates. There are no reports of certificate transparency logs, which track the issuance of all browser-trusted certificates, showing the compromised keys being used maliciously. The threat remains far from over, however, because it will be hard and time-consuming to update other key parts of the Internet, such as Linux distributions and embedded and Internet of Things devices.

Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services

The attackers launched a series of attacks on the .gh, .sl, and .as country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and then modified authoritative DNS records for selected domains within those namespaces. By controlling those DNS records, the attackers were able to pass automated domain control validation checks and obtain unauthorized certificates for “several Google domains” and “several leading global brands and widely used online services.” Google said it updated Chrome to block all certificates it identified as unauthorized, and worked with the issuing certification authorities to ensure the unauthorized certificates for Google properties were revoked.