Cyberattacks fuel concerns about RSA SecurID breach

Computerworld - Recent attacks against two major defense contractors are fueling concerns about the extent to which RSA's SecurID two-factor authentication technology may have been compromised in a breach the company acknowledged in March.

Lockheed Martin on Saturday said it had suffered a "significant and tenacious" cyberattack on May 21. The company, which is the largest U.S. defense contractor, said it was forced to shut down remote access to deal with the attack, but it maintained that no data was compromised.

Lockheed itself has offered few details about the breach. But Reuters, which first reported the intrusion last Thursday, cited unnamed sources as saying the compromise involved the use of cloned RSA SecurID tokens.

Wired on Wednesday reported that L-3 Communications was similarly attacked in April. L-3 is a major supplier of communication, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technology to the Department of Defense.

Wired cited an internal email that it obtained from an L-3 employee warning that the company was actively targeted by attackers using cloned SecurID tokens. It's not clear from the email whether any intruders managed to break into L-3's networks, or if they were detected while attempting to do so.

L-3 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The reported incidents are again stoking concerns that first surfaced in March when RSA, which is now owned by EMC, disclosed that it had been the victim of a sophisticated cyberattack.

RSA said that attackers had accessed code related to its SecurID two-factor authentication technology. While the stolen information could be used to reduce the effectiveness of SecurID, it would not enable a direct attack on SecurID customers, RSA said.

SecurID tokens are used in conjunction with passwords to deliver a second layer of authentication for system and network access. The technology is available from RSA in the form of hardware and software tokens that are capable of generating unique, one-time passwords every 60 seconds. More than 25,000 enterprises, many of them in the financial sector and government, currently use SecurID tokens to protect access to high-value applications and data.

RSA's refusal to publicly disclose what exactly was compromised -- combined with the attacks on Lockheed and L-3 -- are raising questions about how badly compromised SecurID really is.

"It seems like right now a lot of rumors are floating around," said Aleksandr Yampolskiy, director of security and compliance at Gilt Groupe. "If enterprises like Lockheed Martin are reporting that SecurID tokens were involved, then it's possible that some seeds plus details of the algorithm got revealed."

At this point, SecurID tokens' security is reduced to a single factor -- the pass code that users know. That makes them only as effective as regular passwords, Yampolskiy said.