Have you ever noticed that padlock symbol in your address bar when you go on a website, such as eBay or your emails? These symbols actually mean something, they mean that the website has been verified by an SSL certificate, these are provided by an external company and are designed to let you know that your websites are safe and secure. So can you imagine what that means when bad certificates are issued?
Comodo is one of the companies that provide online certificates and has had to fix just that problem when they released a fix for a bug which issued several certificates after the rules for providing those certificates changed. In a post on their forum, Rob Stradling, Comodo’s senior research and development scientist, posted that eight certificates were issued but didn’t end the post there.
Stradling then went on to state that Comodo may not be the only company to have this problem,
We found non-compliant certificates issused by quite a number of other CAs, but I’ll document these in another post.
With the fix released only two hours after they discovered the bug, the hope is that the padlock can stay a symbol of security and safety online.
