Google urges Iranians: Change your password
Google is telling people in Iran to change their passwords and take other security precautions in the wake of an Internet attack in which the google.com domain was spoofed.
"We learned last week that the compromise of a Dutch company involved with verifying the authenticity of websites could have put the Internet communications of many Iranians at risk, including their Gmail," Eric Grosse, Google's vice president of security engineering, wrote in a blog post last night.
"While Google's internal systems were not compromised, we are directly contacting possibly affected users and providing similar information below because our top priority is to protect the privacy and security of our users," he wrote.
Specifically, Google recommends that users in Iran change their passwords; verify their account recovery options; check the Web sites and applications that are allowed to access their Google account; check Gmail settings for suspicious forwarding addresses or delegated accounts; and pay attention to warnings that appear in the Web browser and don't click past them.
An
Digital certificates are supposed to serve as proof that a Web site is the site it claims to be when a Web surfer uses an "https" connection. But the 600 or so companies that provide the certificates have differing levels of security and no standard process for automatically revoking fraudulent certificates.