Some of the major barriers to the adoption of cloud computing involve trust and security. Part of the problem is that even if the parties are prepared to exchange information, the many-to-many relationships mean a lot of work.
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.
In February this year RSA, the security arm of information infrastructure firm EMC, announced that it had been the victim of a cyber attack and that critical information may have been stolen from its servers.
A massive Pastebin dump of domain names and IP addresses supposedly linked to a cyber espionage ring appears to be the real deal.
The Pastebin dump, dated August 15, lists around 850 entries containing domain names and IP addresses, supposedly leaked by "RSA Employee #15666". The dump asserts the IP addresses and domain names listed are used in command and control operations by a cyber-espionage ring.
Companies need to reconsider their security focus to concentrate on dealing with hackers once they're in, rather than assuming that they can always keep them out, according to Australia and New Zealand RSA general manager Andy Solterbeck, sending the message that if it happened to them, it could happen to anyone.
The winners of the pwnie awards were announced last night at an event in Las Vegas, Nevada. A total of nine awards were due to be presented in categories including most innovative research, most epic fail and ‘lamest vendor response'.
The breach of RSA, the security division of EMC, last spring in which sensitive information related to RSA SecurID tokens was stolen, can be traced back to an attack originating in China, a security researcher strongly believes based on a close look into malware associated with the RSA breach.
RSA's SecurID token users have recently been targeted with fake emails supposedly coming from the US National Security Agency urging them to update their token code.
The address from which the emails are sent has been spoofed and says "protection@nsa.security.gov", but the offered malicious links take the victim to the national-security-agency.com domain, which according to Cyveillance, has been registered only the day before the spam run was started.
Symantec has begun to replace its global fleet of RSA SecurID tokens following its acquisition of VeriSign's Authentication Services last year.
The swap comes in the wake of the high-profile breach of RSA tokens in March, although the company said it already had planned to "eat its own cookie" and dump RSA for Versign's Public Key Infrastructure platform.
For any company that makes its living selling security, it's a nightmare come true. This week, RSA Security admitted that hackers who broke into its network three months ago had stolen information about its SecurID tokens and then used that information to attack a customer, Lockheed Martin.
