The so-called Comodo Hacker has claimed credit for the breach of Dutch SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate authority DigiNotar, now known to be behind 531 forged certificates.
The Pastebin account for Comodohacker had remained relatively silent since March, according to security vendor F-Secure, when the hacker posted convincing evidence that they had breached fellow CA, Comodo.
“I told all that I can do it again, I told all in interviews that I still have accesses in Comodo resellers, I told all I have access to most of CAs, you see that words now?” the hacker who identifies as a nationalistic Iranian wrote.
The password the attacker claimed to use to breach DigiNotar’s certificate network was Pr0d@dm1n. They also claimed to have access to four more “high profile” CAs besides DigiNotar, and threatened to release more “certs” in the future.
The fraudulent certificates would allow an attacker to intercept SSL encrypted communications, and is believed to have been used to monitor web communications of hundreds of thousands of Iranians.
The Comodo Hacker also claimed to have hacked Linux operating system maker and certificate authority, StartCom, and GlobalSign, which boasts amongst its client base the BBC, Toyota, ING, Skype, Virgin Atlantic, Vodafone, BT, Adobe and the UK’s health department, NHS, and pharma giant, Novartis.
The attack on DigiNotar was apparently an act of nationalism in retribution for inaction by the Dutch military 16 years ago in Bosnia, and was designed to undermine the $13 million the government had spent on the CA.
DigiNotar was authoritised to issue certificates under the Dutch Government’s PKIoverheid program, which was initially believed to have escaped the breach but was later discovered to have been also compromised.
The Comodohacker’s March Pastebin dump also revealed a nationalistic motivation for that attack because they were against US support for the nation’s pro-democracy Green Movement.
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“Almost from the beginning of the DigiNotar CA disaster, we had a reason to believe the case was connected to ‘ComodoGate’,” said F-Secure chief research analyst Mikko Hypponen.
According to FOX-IT's analysis of the DigiNotar breach, it found a reference to the name "Janam Fadaye Rahbar" in a script only used for Public Key Infrastructure code that was also found in the Comodo hack.
Although the Pastebin dump was released via the Twitter handle @ichsunx2, another account @eqe on Monday released a volley of posts detailing elements of the attack on DigiNotar, including their use of XUDA, a library that is contained in RSA products.
“How I did all xUDA programming without 1 line of resource, got this idea, owned your network accesses your domain controlled, got all your... passwords, signed my certificates and received them shortly...”