A company that vouches for websites had secret keys so weak that 8 of them were cracked

Crypto users should care about this too, mostly outside the browser. Exchange bots, trading scripts and wallet backends often run on Python, Node or Go. A forged certificate for an exchange's API could let an attacker on the same network read or change a bot's traffic. No crypto attacks have been reported, and no attacks on users have been reported so far.

CoinDesk contacted eMudhra for comment.

Browser makers and software developers have pushed out emergency fixes. Mozilla got the report just on Oct. 17 after 8 p.m. UTC and had a block in place about three hours later. Chrome blocked the certificates the same day. Apple followed on Oct. 19 and Microsoft on Oct. 20. eMudhra has also revoked them.

Mozilla browser warned that network interceptors could use these fraudulent certificates to impersonate trusted sites, allowing them to read or alter the user's data.

How the keys got out is still unclear.

"According to researchers, eMudhra used tiny integers like 4, 56, and 237 as private keys instead of strong 384-bit random numbers," Cyber Security News said on X.

Security researcher Scott Helme went further.

"One of eMudhra's certificate authority private keys is the number 4," he wrote. "Another one is 56, and another is 115."