Dutch government identifies over 500 rogue certificates

The Dutch government has revoked trust in Diginotar and released a list of over 500 fraudulent certificates issued by the hackers who broke into the company's infrastructure last month. Some of them are for the domains of the CIA, Mossad and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

The Diginotar breach was discovered a week ago when a rogue *.google.com certificate issued by the certificate authority (CA) was used in attacks against Gmail users in Iran. The company admitted suffering an intrusion back in July which resulted in fraudulent certificates being issued for a number of domains.

The browser vendors reacted promptly by removing the Diginotar CA root certificate from their products, but kept the one for Diginotar's PKIoverheid sub-CA, which was used to sign Dutch government certificates.

The investigation into the incident is ongoing, but the security lapses identified are so serious that the Dutch minister of internal affairs announced in an urgent press conference at 1:15am on Saturday that the PKIoverheid sub-CA should no longer be trusted either.

Ever since the company's first public statement about the incident, the security community has wondered how many rogue certificates were issued and what domains were targeted. The Dutch government has now shed some light on this by releasing a list of 531 fraudulent certificates associated with Diginotar.

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