A Mozilla developer revealed this Sunday that included among more than 500 organizations affected in the theft of SSL (secure socket layer) certificates of a Dutch company in July are the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.K.’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad.
The CIA, MI6 and Mossad are affected in the theft of SSL certificates from Dutch firm DigiNotar in July. Image: Catherine Murray / Flickr (CC)
The news comes via Mozilla developer Gervase markham who is member of the team working to block in Firefox the sites signed with the pillaged SSL certificates.
According to reports, not only are the CIA, MI6 and Mossad affected but also Facebook, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo.
The SSL certificates were stolen from DigiNotar who has recently confessed that their systems were breached by hackers in July.
The theft of the SSL certificates pose a serious security vulnerability for internet surfers who may be fooled into giving private information on sites signed with the SSL certificates thinking they are on legitimate sites.
As a result, Mozilla and Google are working on blocking all SSL certificates issued by DigiNotar.
