London, Sept 6 (ANI): Fresh evidence has emerged, which indicate that hundreds of forged security certificates obtained by hackers may have been used to spy on people in Iran.
Analysis by the computer security firm Trend Micro revealed that Iranian web users used the forged certificates a disproportionate number of times, suggesting they were the target of a large-scale spying operation that compromised services including Gmail, the Telegrapg reports.
It is believed the digital IDs were being used to trick computers into thinking they were directly accessing sites such as Google, but in reality some one might have been monitoring these communications.
A separate investigation by a Dutch government security agency revealed that DigiNotar issued over 500 forged SSL certificates (encryption protocol used by websites to protect sensitive traffic such as email, online banking and software downloads) for dozens of major websites.
The websites of the CIA, the US intelligence agency, and Mossad, its Israeli counterpart, were on the list, the paper said.
It emerged last week that hackers had taken control of DigiNotar's systems and issued a forged SSL certificate for all of Google's websites.
This would have allowed them to carry out a 'man-in-the-middle' attack, in which they could intercept all traffic between Iranians and Google without either side of the communication being alerted.
"Trend Micro has concrete evidence that these man-in-the-middle attacks happened indeed on a large scale in Iran," the firm said in a blog post.
"Iranian Internet users were exposed to a large scale man-in-the-middle attack, where SSL encrypted traffic can be decrypted by a third party. For example: a third party probably was able to read all email communication an Iranian internet user has sent with his Gmail account," it added.
The forged certificate was issued in July and not detected until 27 August, the paper said. (ANI)
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