Bodo Möller, Thai Duong and Krzysztof Kotowicz of Google discovered a flaw in the design of SSL version 3.0 that would allow an attacker to calculate the plaintext of secure connections, allowing, for example, secure HTTP cookies to be stolen.
References: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/10/this-poodle-bites-exploiting-ssl-30.html https://www.openssl.org/~bodo/ssl-poodle.pdf