Iranian hacker says certificate attack retribution for Stuxnet worm

A lone Iranian hacker who has claimed responsibility for stealing digital certificates used for online transactions says it was revenge for the U.S. and Israel creating a computer worm which targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Last week, the U.S.-based security certificate issuing authority Comodo admitted someone had broken into their systems and that the hacker(s) created fake security certificates for logon websites including Hotmail, Gmail, the internet phone service Skype and for Yahoo Mail.

In a posting on Pastebin.com, the individual, who calls himself ComodoHacker and claims to be a 21-year-old Iranian, said the act was revenge for the Stuxnet virus used by the United States of America and Israel to infect Iran’s nuclear processing facilities including the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant.

The hacker posted detailed information about the attack and claimed he had “no relation to the Iranian Cyber Army” but was in fact “a single hacker with [the] experience of 1,000 hackers.”

Experts however were critical of the claim.

“Do we really believe that a lone hacker gets into a CA [certificate authority], can generate any certificate he wants?” said Mikko Hypponen, a security expert at F-Secure, writing on his Twitter micro blog.

He said the hacker’s posts “look convincing,” but added that “whether they were posted by a 21-year-old lone gunman or the Iranian Government PR department, I don’t know.”

 

MOSCOW, March 28 (RIA Novosti)

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