A Dutch certificate authority that suffered a major hack attack this summer has been unable to recover from the blow and filed for bankruptcy this week.
DigiNotar, which is owned by Illinois-based Vasco Data Security and was the primary provider of digital security certificates for domains owned by the Dutch government, was breached in early June due to lax security.
The breach allowed the intruder to trick DigiNotar’s system into issuing him more than 500 fraudulent digital certificates for top internet companies like Google, Mozilla, and Skype. This meant that users who went to a supposedly secure page such as
https://google.com were at risk of having a malicious third party who possessed the Google certificate pose as the legitimate site and trick the user into entering his username and password into the impostor site.
The breach resulted in an immediate loss of trust in DigiNotar’s integrity as an authority for issuing secure digital certificates, and resulted in swift action from the Dutch government, which pulled its business from the company.
In announcing the bankruptcy filing, DigiNotar’s parent company took pains to distance itself from the breach.