Interesting reading http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/060412-39flame39-spread-via-rogue-microsoft-259838.html
Analysis of the massive 'Flame' cyber attack code has revealed that rogue Microsoft security certificates were used to make the malware appear as if it was officially signed by Microsoft. Microsoft has issued a security advisory, revoked trust in the rogue certificates, and provided steps to help IT admins and users prevent attacks that rely on the spoofed Microsoft certificates.]
Microsoft is taking steps to deal with this issue. First, it released the security advisory which explains the issue in detail and provides steps IT admins can use to block software signed by the rogue security certificates. Microsoft also released an update, which automatically implements those same steps to make it easier for customers to prevent malware using the spoofed certificates from slipping through.
mod edit: fixed [QUOTE]. kail
Some more info Threatpost | The first stop for security news
The details of the collision attack used by the Flame malware authors to create a forged code-signing certificate for Microsoft code are beginning to emerge, and the company said that the attackers used an MD5 hash collision specifically to ensure that their attack would work on machines running Windows Vista and later versions of the OS.
Microsoft also said that it will roll out some hardening changes to its Windows Update infrastructure to prevent the kind of man-in-the-middle attack that Flame used.
"Our hardening introduces two defense-in-depth changes. First, we have further hardened the Windows Update infrastructure so that the Windows Update client will only trust files signed by a new certificate that is used solely to protect updates to the Windows Update client. Second, we are strengthening the communication channel used by Windows Update in a similar way," the company said.
According to scientists in Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists on Ars Technica is the MD5 collision that was used not seen before in the scientific world and must be partly based on world class cryptanalysis.
According to Stevens and de Weger, the collision attack was unlike any that cryptographers have seen before. They arrived at that conclusion after using a custom-designed forensic tool to analyze Flame components.
“More interestingly, the results have shown that not our published chosen-prefix collision attack was used, but an entirely new and unknown variant,” Stevens wrote in a statement distributed on Thursday. “This has led to our conclusion that the design of Flame is partly based on world-class cryptanalysis. Further research will be conducted to reconstruct the entire chosen-prefix collision attack devised for Flame.”
That feeds the idea that goverments are likely to be involved.
looks like its time to use sha2-512 or maybe sha3 seeing as sha1 and sha2 was designed by the NSA.