Such attacks are not unique to Comodo – the specifics will vary from CA to CA, RA to RA, but there are so many of these entities, all of them trusted by default, that further holes are deemed to be inevitable. Association with PrivDog In February 2015, Comodo was associated with a man-in-the-middle enabling tool known as PrivDog, which claims to protect users against malicious advertising. PrivDog issued a statement on 23 February 2015, saying, "A minor intermittent defect has been detected in a third party library used by the PrivDog standalone application which potentially affects a very small number of users. This potential issue is only present in PrivDog versions, 3.0.96.0 and 3.0.97.0. The potential issue is not present in the PrivDog plug-in that is distributed with Comodo Browsers, and Comodo has not distributed this version to its users. there are potentially a maximum of 6,294 users in the USA and 57,568 users globally that this could potentially impact. The third party library used by PrivDog is not the same third party library used by Superfish....The potential issue has already been corrected. There will be an update tomorrow which will automatically update all 57,568 users of these specific PrivDog versions." Certificates issued to known malware distributors In 2009 Microsoft MVP Michael Burgess accused Comodo of issuing digital certificates to known malware distributors. Comodo responded when notified and revoked the certificates in question, which were used to sign the known malware. Chromodo browser, ACL, no ASLR, VNC weak authentication In January 2016, Tavis Ormandy reported that Comodo's Chromodo browser exhibited a number of vulnerabilities, including disabling of the same-origin policy. The vulnerability wasn't in the browser itself, which was based on the open-source code behind Google's Chrome browser. Rather, the issue was with an add-on. As soon as Comodo became aware of the issue in early February 2016, the company released a statement and a fix: "As an industry, software in general is always being updated, patched, fixed, addressed, improved – it goes hand in hand with any development cycle...What is critical in software development is how companies address an issue if a certain vulnerability is found – ensuring it never puts the customer at risk." Those using Chromodo immediately received an update. The Chromodo browser was subsequently discontinued by Comodo. Ormandy noted that Comodo received a "Excellence in Information Security Testing" award from Verizon despite the vulnerability in its