Microsoft reissues update for Win XP/2003 for DigiNotar certificate revocation

Microsoft had to reissue an update for users of Windows XP and Windows 2003 today related to the compromise of certificate authority DigiNotar.
It was not related to further hacking though, it appears to be a quality assurance SNAFU at the software giant.
Microsoft has updated the known issues in security advisory 2607712 to refer to an updated advisory 2616766.
KB article 2616766 points out that the update shipped last week to remove the known compromised certificates from the trusted certificate list omitted the certificates known to have been in use in the wild.
Somehow Microsoft's Patch Tuesday update only removed additional certificates issued to DigiNotar by GTE and Entrust, but did not remove the original root certificates used to intercept communications in Iran.
Users of Windows XP and 2003 with automatic updating enabled will receive the updated patch automatically, but administrators who manually deploy patches using WSUS may be required to push update 2616676 a second time.
Even worse the update requires users of XP and 2003 to reboot after applying the fixed update. Users of Windows 7, Vista, 2008 and 2008 R2 are unaffected.

SSCC 72 - DigiNotar, DNS hijacking and Firesheep v2

This week my guest for the podcast was Mike Wood, a Senior Threat Researcher at SophosLabs in Vancouver, Canada.

Mike is our expert on digital certificates and how malware authors try to use andabuse digital certificates for their own purposes.

I talked briefly about this month's Patch Tuesday, which fortunately is a small one compared to others this year.

I also briefly mentioned the compromise at DNS registrar NetNames. The attacker pointed the DNS for The Register, UPS and others to a Turkish hacker web site.

We discussed the latest version of Firesheep and how it is now able to steal your Google search history due to a flaw in how some Google sites handle cookies.

The meat of this Chet Chat was spent discussing the recent breach and impact of the hacker(s) who compromised certificate authority DigiNotar.

Mike went into some detail of how certificates have been abused and what these attackers might accomplish if they were to use bogus certificates they purloined from DigiNotar.

(8 September 2011, duration 27:22 minutes, size 12.5 MBytes)

You can also download this podcast directly in MP3 format: Sophos Security Chet Chat 72 or subscribe to our RSS.