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DNS Hijacking Abuses Trust In Core Internet Service

While this incident is limited to targeting primarily national security organizations in the Middle East and North Africa, and we do not want to overstate the consequences of this specific campaign, we are concerned that the success of this operation will lead to actors more broadly attacking the global DNS system. DNS is a foundational technology supporting the Internet. Manipulating that system has the potential to undermine the trust users have on the internet.
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Once these credentials were captured, the user would then be passed to the legitimate service. to evade detection, the actors performed "certificate impersonation," a technique in which the attacker obtained a certificate authority-signed X.509 certificate from another provider for the same domain imitating the one already used by the targeted organization. For example, if a DigiCert certificate protected a website, the threat actors would obtain a certificate for the same domain but from another provider, such as Let's Encrypt or Comodo. This tactic would make detecting the MitM attack more difficult, as a user's web browser would still display the expected "SSL padlock" in the URL bar.