Safari, Mac OS X and Fraudulent SSL Certificates (Comodo)

Following the recent hacking of Comodo, a certificate authority that distributes SSL certificates, web users to the following domains are at a higher risk of phishing and sniffing attacks:

• login.live.com
• mail.google.com
• www.google.com
• login.yahoo.com
• login.skype.com
• addons.mozilla.org

Attackers were able to obtain SSL certificates for these domains, essentially allowing them to pose as those websites. The certificates have since been revoked by Comodo, however this relies on browsers checking for them by checking Comodo’s Certificate Revocation List (CRL) and having the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) enabled. Firefox and Chrome were updated last week to block the fraudulent certs, but Safari doesn’t do CRL and OCSP checking by default.

Hit the jump for how to enable these checks in OSX and Safari. Read more