It might not sound like the most important milestone in cybersecurity, but today Google cracked an old cryptographic algorithm called SHA-1. But using some extreme maths and computing power, that's what Google did, alongside researchers from the CWI Institute in Amsterdam, with two distinct PDFs. For instance, the Chrome browser will automatically mark any SSL certificate signed using SHA-1 as insecure. The Shattered attack, as named by Google, could work in select scenarios where SHA-1 is still trusted. To be clear, anyone wanting to carry out the attack for real would require astonishing computing power.

Source: Forbes February 23, 2017 16:08 UTC