They did, yes. It was a code-signing certificate, and it was a relatively long time ago. You'd be hard pressed to do that again.<p>Mistakes happen and always will - lessons were learned, procedures tightened.
Nowadays getting, say, an EV certificate mis-issued would be hard. Not impossible as of course documents can be faked, people social-engineered - but it's definitely not as simple as just asking for a certificate anymore.<p>Also - most CAs have insurance policies that can be claimed upon in the case that a mis-issued certificate is used and causes financial loss.