GlobalSign, one of the longest established Certification Authorities (CA) today said it would temporarily cease issuance of all digital certificates following a claim that the same hacker responsible for the recent DigiNotar hack had access to four other Certificate Authorities, and named GlobalSign as one of them.
The company posted the following announcement on the incident on Tuesday afternoon:
On Sep 5th 2011 the individual/group previously confirmed to have hacked several Comodo resellers, claimed responsibility for the recent DigiNotar hack. In his message posted on Pastebin, he also referred to having access to 4 further high profile Certificate Authorities, and named GlobalSign as one of the 4.
GlobalSign takes this claim very seriously and is currently investigating. As a responsible CA, we have decided to temporarily cease issuance of all Certificates until the investigation is complete. We will post updates as frequently as possible.
“None of us knows where the next breach will occur, or whether it will occur in a week or three months,” said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi, an Internet security company that provides enterprise key and certificate management solutions. “Enterprises must ready themselves to respond immediately if they implement the four steps of CA compromise recovery. The very serious implication is that you better wake up. Get out of denial. Understand that this is a huge issue of business continuity.”
Founded in 1996, GlobalSign sells SSL Certificates, EV SSL, Managed SSL Services, S/MIME email security and Code Signing for use on all platforms including mobile devices. The company says it has issued over 200,000 SSL server Certificates and over 1.4 million Digital Certificates and Digital IDs to people, web sites and machines.
Customers listed on GlobalSign’s Web site include Skype, BT, Adobe, Virgin Atlantic, ING, Vodafone and many more.