Yesterday, Google announced a serious exploit in the 15-year old SSL 3.0 design.
It is called the POODLE Attack, which stands for Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption. It is a "man in the middle" exploit which takes advantage of web browsers' fallback to SSL 3.0. You can read all the technical details in this Google paper.
Google said the solution is to not support it.
Disabling SSL 3.0 support, or CBC-mode ciphers with SSL 3.0, is sufficient to mitigate this issue, but presents significant compatibility problems, even today. Therefore our recommended response is to support TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV. This is a mechanism that solves the problems caused by retrying failed connections and thus prevents attackers from inducing browsers to use SSL 3.0. It also prevents downgrades from TLS 1.2 to 1.1 or 1.0 and so may help prevent future attacks.
Google said in the coming months they will disable SSL 3.0 support completely from their products.
You can read a lot more about this at Techmeme.
I do wonder if Google's search results will start labeling sites with SSL 3.0 issues.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
