How a Google Headhunter’s E-Mail Unraveled a Massive Net Security Hole

YosemiteSam

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Good read.

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It was a strange e-mail, coming from a job recruiter at Google, asking Zachary Harris if he was interested in a position as a site-reliability engineer.

“You obviously have a passion for Linux and programming,” the e-mail from the Google recruiter read. “I wanted to see if you are open to confidentially exploring opportunities with Google?”

Harris was intrigued, but skeptical. The e-mail had come to him last December completely out of the blue, and as a mathematician, he didn’t seem the likeliest candidate for the job Google was pitching.

So he wondered if the e-mail might have been spoofed – something sent from a scammer to appear to come from the search giant. But when Harris examined the e-mail’s header information, it all seemed legitimate.

Then he noticed something strange. Google was using a weak cryptographic key to certify to recipients that its correspondence came from a legitimate Google corporate domain. Anyone who cracked the key could use it to impersonate an e-mail sender from Google, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

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Phoenix

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XKCD would be proud of him :)


I'll bet the Google founders never ever bothered to even thank him.
 
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