Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar, the company hit by a cyber attack that caused fraudulent SSL certificates to be leaked into the wild, has filed for bankruptcy.
The hack was discovered July 19, and after 531 fake certificates were issued. Details of the hack weren’t made public until August.
“Although we are saddened by this action and the circumstances that necessitated it,” said T. Kendall Hunt, VASCO’s Chairman and CEO, “we would like to remind our customers and investors that the incident at DigiNotar has no impact on VASCO’s core authentication technology. The technological infrastructures of VASCO and DigiNotar remain completely separated, meaning that there is no risk for infection of VASCO’s strong authentication business. In addition, we plan to cooperate with the Trustee and the Judge to the fullest extent reasonably practicable to bring the affairs of DigiNotar to an appropriate conclusion for its employees and customers. We also plan to cooperate with the Dutch government in its investigation of the person or persons responsible for the attack on DigiNotar.”
Note: DigiNotar is a subsidiary of VASCO.
Jan Valcke, VASCO’s President and COO, added the following:
“While we do not plan to re-enter the certificate authority business in the near future, we expect that we will be able to integrate the PKI/identity verification technology acquired from DigiNotar into our core authentication platform. As a result, we expect to be able to offer a stronger authentication product line in the coming year to our traditional customers.”
As pointed out by F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen on Twitter, DigiNotar is not the first company to go to the wall following a cyber attack:
Diginotar is not the first company forced to shut down because of online attacks. CloudNine and Blue Frog come to mind. There are others.
