Google on Thursday mentioned late Christmas Eve, they discovered and blocked an unauthorized digital certificate that was produced for the “*.google.com” domain that had been published by an intermediate certificate authority (CA) which connected back to Turkish certificate authority, TURKTRUST.
Google updated Chrome’s certificate revocation metadata to block the intermediate CA, and said they’ve alerted TURKTRUST of the issue.
“TURKTRUST told us that based on our information, they discovered that in August 2011 they had mistakenly issued two intermediate CA certificates to organizations that should have instead received regular SSL certificates,” Adam Langley, a Software Engineer at Google published in a blog post on Thursday.
Microsoft has also issued a security advisory on the incident and took measures to protect clients, saying they’d update the Certificate Trust list (CTL) and allow an update for all certified releases of Microsoft Windows to remove the certificates in question.
“The fraudulent certificate could be used to spoof content, perform phishing attacks, or perform man-in-the-middle attacks against several Google web properties,” Microsoft’s advisory continued. “This issue affects all supported releases of Microsoft Windows.”