RSA Spearphish Attack May Have Hit US Defense Organizations

The hackers who broke into EMC's RSA Security division last March used the same attack code to try to break into several other companies, including two U.S. national security organizations, according to data provided by the VirusTotal website.

"According to our data, RSA was just one of the targets," said Bernardo Quintero, the founder of malware analysis site VirusTotal. Attackers "used the same malware to try to penetrate other networks," he said in an email interview.

VirusTotal is a popular site with security professionals who use it to get a quick industry consensus take on suspicious files. It runs any file through a battery of antivirus scanning engines and spits out a report within minutes. Someone at EMC used the service on March 19 to analyze an email message that contained that spearphishing attack that was used to break into RSA.