When hackers broke into Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar in July, the unknown assailants made off with more than 200 digital certificates for popular Internet destinations such as Mozilla, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and even privacy and anonymizing service Tor. The exact number of fraudulent certificates is not known, as DigiNotar has not identified possible targets other than Google. 

The news only broke after some users in Iran reported error messages after accessing the Gmail website over the weekend. As reported by Wired, Google has since confirmed the presence of a fraudulent Google certificate that appears to be used by an external party in a bid to intercept Gmail accounts in Iran.

DigiNotar has now admitted to a break-in, and says that it has revoked the certificates obtained by the intruders in the wake of the earlier break-in.

Already heavily criticized for not revealing the security breach earlier, the latest revelation does not bode well for the company. Amid speculation that more than one fake certificate was been missed by the company, prominent software makers like Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Google have opted to dump DigiNotar as their certificate authority.

DigiNotar suspended its sales of certificates pending a security audit by third parties.

For more:
- check out this article at Wired
- check out this article at Network World
- check out this article at Computerworld

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