The first victim of the attack that happened on the RSA’s SecurID authentication service in March is found as Lockheed Martin. The unknown hackers hacked using duplicate SecurID tokens to spoof legitimate authentications into the network into Lockheed Martin’s security systems. These tokens keep changing every time and are analogous to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Authenticators: Tiny little keyfobs. These must be entered to log in to the authorized security systems.
The aim of the hackers could probably be to steal all information about the existing and future weapon systems also information related to the various cybersecurity services the company provides. But the question is why only Lockheed’s system? The apt answer to this is that Lockheed is the nation’s largest military contractor. Hopefully these critical information are not out to the hackers as for any security contractor would keep such top-secret information at reach to criminals.
At an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lockheed’s spokesman Jeffery Adams said “To counter any threats, we regularly take actions to increase the security of our systems and to protect our employee, customer and program data. We have policies and procedures in place to mitigate the cyber threats to our business, and we remain confident in the integrity of our robust, multilayered information systems security”. Sometime back, the company was already warned of hacking attack. As a precaution some of the company’s remote access capabilities on its systems, as well as a new order for 90,000 replacement SecurID tokens for the company’s employees were shut down and the passwords of all the users were also changed.
Inspite of all the security, the hackers obtained master key files and duplicated keys to penetrate through the systems. The officials of RSA say that they have produced around 250 million security tokens till date and they have been training all their customers on how to safeguard their systems from such attacks.
