Google catches French finance ministry pretending to be Google

Google appears to have caught the French finance ministry spying on its workers’ Internet traffic by spoofing Google security certificates, judging from an episode that took place recently.

The web firm said in a blog post that it had become aware of “unauthorized digital certificates for several Google domains.” It tracked the provenance of these certificates back to ANSSI, the French state information security agency, which in turn pointed to the Treasury as the culprit. Browsers use such certificates to verify that a web service is what it says it is, and creating a fake certificate can allow an attacker to impersonate a service like Google, duping the user into handing over personal information. This is known as a man-in-the-middle attack – it’s been used by the NSA, and is probably that agency’s chief weapon in circumventing industry-standard TLS/SSL web encryption.