Urgent Certificate Patch Issued by Microsoft to Address ‘Out-of-Band’ Foreign Certificates

It is said that Microsoft normally releases their patches and updates on the second Tuesday of every month, also known by most as being Patch Tuesday. This time however, they have apparently been forced to release another update having discovered that foreign encryption certificates for big websites, such as Google, had been coming from the National Informatics Center of India’s certificate server.

The problem here is that attackers have allegedly gained access to the certificate generation system and have issued at least 45 certificates, allowing them to pose as companies ranging from email providers to search engines and even banks, as well as credit card processors. Having NIC generating the certificates, the possibility of becoming a victim is extremely high due to browsers showing the given web sites as being trustworthy, having Microsoft flagging the issue as top priority and issuing the urgent ‘out-of-band’ patch.

“The subordinate CA has been misused to issue SSL certificates for multiple sites, including Google web properties. These SSL certificates could be used to spoof content, perform phishing attacks, or perform man-in-the-middle attacks against web properties,” Microsoft warned in its emergency bulletin. “The subordinate CAs may also have been used to issue certificates for other, currently unknown sites, which could be subject to similar attacks.”

Microsoft has stated that the update in question is being rolled out automatically to all Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 users, as well as users of older Windows operating systems who have installed a recommended Windows Update patch, adding the certificate revocation support to the operating system.

Thank you Bit-Tech for providing us with this information