Opera breached, has code cert stolen, possibly spreads malware

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/06/27/opera-breached-certificate-stolen/

by JoeCoo7 • 13 years ago

172 33 13 years ago

nakedsecurity.sophos.com

ernesth• 13 years ago

So should I trust the update that apt-get shows me? There is a 12.16.1760 in the deb.opera.com repository while the opera main page gives a download for version 12.15!

jdhendrickson• 13 years ago

Until we know more it would be folly to upgrade, I would recommend using a different browser for the time being.

gbrindisi• 13 years ago

From the Sophos article the malware spread is Zeus which is Windows based.

James_Duval• 13 years ago

Zeus? As in banking-details-stealing trojan horse Zeus?

As someone who has Opera installed on their home machine, which they also use for banking, how worried should I be?

Would Malwarebytes be enough to find and remove the trojan?

EDIT: http://malwaretips.com/blogs/zeus-trojan-virus/

pestaa• 13 years ago

The article claims the official story is unclear, but I disagree. As a potential customer, I've learnt everything I need to know to protect myself from vulnerabilities. (Though the inner hacker would like to hear how their infrastructure was compromised and whether it can have any effect on related services, such as Fastmail.)

Opera also states the security breach has been handled on their end, so I see nothing wrong with the announcement's title either.

It would be unfortunate if the situation got out of hand, with recent fundamental changes to their browser, Opera now needs 100% focus to stay competitive.

alfiejohn_• 13 years ago

FastMail runs on completely separate infrastructure and there were no indications of a compromise.

However to be on the safe side we've taken a number of precautions including blowing away every machine (fai-project.org FTW!) and updating credentials everywhere.

josteink• 13 years ago

Ow. That's really, really bad.

Opera is already a pretty small actor so stuff like this probably hurts them more than the bigger guys. This incident will probably show in the bottom-line later on.

Hope they get their things sorted out, and I really hope they learn enough to avoid having anything like this happening in the future. Things like this are never OK if there is a second time around.

antocv2• 13 years ago

This is really bad, but it depends who the attacker is, I wouldnt hold it against them if it was a government (or government sponsored entity).

aqrashik• 13 years ago

A government (or government sponsored entity) probably wouldn't be so brazen to start using the stolen certificate to distribute malware on Opera's site.

I would imagine that keeping this a secret would be worth a lot more to the right people.

Nux3• 13 years ago

Opera is still big on mobile, there's still nothing quite like Opera Mini, they should be careful at defending this.

thezilch2• 13 years ago

What do you mean nothing quite like it? It may be the very best at supporting more platforms and raw speed, but Amazon Silk [0] and Chrome Mobile [1] are hot on their heals. There are a lot of advantages (eg. how CSS and JS aren't hamstrung) to the later two, and not having to traverse to SWE networks has to be advantageous -- anecdotal.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk [1] https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/data-compre...

perlgeek• 13 years ago

There's another possibility: Maybe opera has an internal service that accepts software uploads and automatically signs them. That way an attacker might have spread malware without having stolen the certificate.

jacobr• 13 years ago

Official announcement: http://my.opera.com/securitygroup/blog/2013/06/26/opera-infr...

hmottestad• 13 years ago

"...may automatically have received and installed the malicious software..."

That is nice. Automatic installation of malware. It's the way to go :)

Sami_Lehtinen• 13 years ago

Just count how many apps, devices (firmware), programs etc. there are which do not use any certs at all. Using automatic updates is very real danger. I just think most uses / admins do not think how common it actually is.

pbsdp3• 13 years ago

This is a pretty compelling argument against silent automatic updates.

BCM43• 13 years ago

How so? The alternative is people got a pop-up, then click install without verifying it (how could they?). It's functionally the same thing almost all the time.

mikevm• 13 years ago

How would this be any different if a dialog box popped up asking you to install a new update? I bet most people (including you?) would just click "Continue".

mikhailt• 13 years ago

No, it isn't, this would've affected all manual, silent/or visible automatic updates.

Users checking for updates or visible automatic update prompts during that timeframe that Opera said was offering the infected update would still get the malware.

People assume that getting automatic update prompts would allow them to stop the update if they heard about an infected update. The problem with that logic is that by the time the companies know about a breach, they would've shut down the automatic update FIRST and then fix the breach, then resume it. Customers would rarely know about that breach in advance, so the prompt wouldn't change anything here.

counterpointer• 13 years ago

The signing keys are the weakest link in the security infrastructure and are essentially the keys to the kingdom. We have seen this happen repeatedly, I think it's time for all companies to build a lot of safeguards around the use of their private signing keys, like making employees input it manually everytime, or even split it across multiple employees. For Opera at least, I don't think they do releases that frequently.

stock_toaster2• 13 years ago

I wonder if this impacted Fastmail as well... ;_;

unlikelymordant• 13 years ago

nope: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5952266

stock_toaster2• 13 years ago

Ah. Thanks for the pointer.

Opera breached, has code cert stolen, possibly spreads malware

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