"It does not escape [our] notice that the domains targeted would be of greatest use to a government attempting surveillance of Internet use by dissident groups," Comodo said. "The attack comes at a time when many countries in North Africa and the [Persian] Gulf region are ."

According to a published earlier today, the nine fake certificates were issued for login.live.com, mail.google.com, www.google.com, login.yahoo.com, login.skype.com, addons.mozilla.org and Global Trustee.

Three certificates were acquired for , said , and one each for the others.

The attack and acquisition of the certificates has prompted , Microsoft and Mozilla to issue updates so users of their will be warned if they try to reach a site that's serving up one of the phony certificates.

Google was the first to react: It last week.