> which served the website using a fake certificate This would cause an untrusted certificate error in browsers. > failed to obtain an SSL certificate while m

> which served the website using a fake certificate This would cause an untrusted certificate error in browsers. > failed to obtain an SSL certificate while man-in-the-middle attacking The sentence doesn't make sense. MITM is by definition an attack where an actor was able to impersonate the target. In this case, they presented an certificate that was not signed by a CA in the root CA file on the clients. So this can be qualified as a failed MITM attempt.