{"id":1717,"date":"2011-04-01T17:28:22","date_gmt":"2011-04-01T11:58:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qadit.com\/blog\/?p=1717"},"modified":"2011-04-05T17:33:08","modified_gmt":"2011-04-05T12:03:08","slug":"rsa-security-inc-hacked-how-it-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/rsa-security-inc-hacked-how-it-happened\/","title":{"rendered":"RSA Security Inc Hacked-How it Happened"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>RSA, the security division of EMC and producer of the SecurID systems used by countless corporations (and the Department of Defense), has been hacked. The company sent out messages to its clients and posted an open letter stating that it&#8217;s been the victim of an &#8220;advanced&#8221; attack that &#8220;resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA&#8217;s systems&#8221; &#8212; information &#8220;specifically related to RSA&#8217;s SecurID two-factor authentication products.&#8221; The copy of the letter can be found at this link-<a href=\"https:\/\/www.rsa.com\/node.aspx?id=3872\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/www.rsa.com\/node.aspx?id=3872<\/a><br \/>\n<br \/><\/br><\/p>\n<p>The worry is that source code to the company&#8217;s SecurID two-factor authentication product was stolen, which would possibly  allow hackers to reverse-engineer or otherwise break the system.<br \/>\n<br \/><\/br><\/p>\n<p>Initially, it released no details about how the attack was carried  out. Now, RSA\u2013which is a unit of storage giant EMC\u2013has gone into some  detail concerning how its systems were breached, in a blog post by Uri  Rivner, whose title is Head of New Technologies, Identity Protection and  Verification. It all started with phishing emails.<br \/>\n<br \/><\/br><\/p>\n<p>Over the course of two days, two groups of emails were sent to a small  group of employees, none of them high profile, nor apparently especially  senior. Though RSA doesn\u2019t spell out who received them, the emails may  well have gone to the human resources department or some other quiet  corner of the company. The emails contained an Excel spreadsheet  attachment entitled \u201c2011 Recruitment Plans.\u201d Naturally it was created  to look just believable enough that one of the employees who received it  fished it out of the spam folder to which it was initially directed and  opened it. You can probably fill in most of the blanks from here.<br \/>\n<br \/><\/br><\/p>\n<p>The spreadsheet contained a Zero-day exploit that took advantage of a weakness in Adobe Flash, which has since been patched.  Through that hole, attackers were able to install anything they wanted  on the target machine. They chose a version of a program called Poison  Ivy RAT, and in this case RAT stands for \u201cremote administration tool,\u201d a program that is used to control one computer from another in a different location.<br \/>\n<br \/><\/br><\/p>\n<p>Still unexplained at this point: What information was taken, and does  it in any way affect the integrity of its own security products? When  the attack was first disclosed, the company said that some information  about its SecureID products was taken by the attackers. This has led to a  lot of questions and speculation by security pros who naturally have to  think about the worst-case scenario, and frankly, there are many for  which the adjective \u201cworst\u201d would apply.<br \/>\n<br \/><\/br><\/p>\n<p>The big looming question is whether or not the attacker gained access  to the seeds\u2013the random keys embedded in each token\u2013that are used to  generate the constantly changing numeric codes that appear on the  device\u2019s display.<br \/>\n<br \/><\/br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>RSA, the security division of EMC and producer of the SecurID systems used by countless corporations (and the Department of Defense), has been hacked. The company sent out messages to its clients and posted an open letter stating that it&#8217;s been the victim of an &#8220;advanced&#8221; attack that &#8220;resulted in certain information being extracted from &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/rsa-security-inc-hacked-how-it-happened\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;RSA Security Inc Hacked-How it Happened&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-itsec","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9AH7Q-rH","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qadit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}