"Operators of those servers would have had the capability to read, delete, or edit unencrypted e-mail and other communications passing through those servers during that time, he said. The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), used by e-commerce sites to encrypt traffic over the Internet, has been compromised so even supposedly protected traffic could have been exposed, according to Joffe."

This bit of the article doesn't make sense to me, and wasn't explained further. How could SSL be compromised via an Internet routing hack such as this?