End of the road for DigiNotar as bankruptcy declared

DigiNotar, the Dutch certificate authority which hackers compromised and used to generate hundreds of bogus web security certificates, has filed for bankruptcy.
The announcement that DigiNotar has filed for voluntary bankruptcy was made today by its US parent company VASCO Data Security International.
And, quite frankly, there aren't many who will be mourning its loss.

VASCO's CEO, T. Kendall Hunt, seemed keen to disassociate the parent firm from the security problems seen at its subsidiary:

"We would like to remind our customers and investors that the incident at DigiNotar has no impact on VASCO's core authentication technology. The technological infrastructures of VASCO and DigiNotar remain completely separated, meaning that there is no risk for infection of VASCO's strong authentication business."

Cliff Bown, Vasco's chief financial officer, said the losses associated with DigiNotar "were expected to be significant."
It's unlikely that many people are going to shed many tears over the demise of DigiNotar. The firm lost all trust when when it was discovered that it had known that it had suffered a security breach weeks before coming clean about the problem.
But it does serve as a chilling reminder of just how fatal a hack can be for an organisation, especially if the way your corporation decides to respond to it is woefully insufficient.
The fraudulent certificates were issued in the name of major web properties such as Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google; and even in the name of intelligence agencies such as the Mossad and the CIA).
For more background on the DigiNotar security scandal, make sure to take the time to listen to a recent Sophos podcast which discussed the issue featuring Sophos experts Chester Wisniewski and Mike Wood:
You can also download the podcast directly in MP3 format: Sophos Security Chet Chat 72

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.