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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 30 2018, @06:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-internet-was-broken dept.

Kevin Beaumont reports that, by compromising a router at Equinix in Chicago, attackers were able to forge DNS responses for myetherwallet.com, with users "redirected to a server hosted in Russia, which served the website using a fake certificate." Victims' online wallets were drained of cryptocurrency.

Also at The Verge and Ars Technica which said

Amazon lost control of a small number of its cloud services IP addresses for two hours on [April 24] when hackers exploited a known Internet-protocol weakness that let them to redirect traffic to rogue destinations. By subverting Amazon's domain-resolution service, the attackers masqueraded as cryptocurrency website MyEtherWallet.com and stole about $150,000 in digital coins from unwitting end users. They may have targeted other Amazon customers as well.

Wikipedia on BGP


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @01:22PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @01:22PM (#673709)

    Are you using Let's Encrypt as an example, or are you saying there's something especially lax about Let's Encrypt? Other CAs offer certificates that are verified by showing control of a hostname by putting a special file on a website, or by receiving an e-mail. Reportedly, that didn't happen in this attack: the Verge says visitors to the malicious site were getting warned by their browsers because of problems with the certificate.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 30 2018, @01:50PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday April 30 2018, @01:50PM (#673720) Journal

    Are you using Let's Encrypt as an example, or are you saying there's something especially lax about Let's Encrypt?

    I used LE specifically because I knew that LE uses such a mechanism, but I didn't know that other CAs use similar mechanisms. Of course as far as other CAs use similar mechanisms, similar strategies should work for them as well.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @01:48PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @01:48PM (#674129)

      > I didn't know that other CAs use similar mechanisms

      Think about it. There has to be a way to transfer domains to new, legitimate owners. There has to be a way to verify ownership in the first place. Maybe the WHOIS data has a working phone number - but what are the odds that goes to the person making the request, in a large org?

      Point being: it's not write-once. IP control is over-relied upon as identity proof.