EMC’s security division, RSA got hacked. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by the company, the introducers managed to get pass through “a popular and widely used anti-hacking technology” and actually extract certain data from RSA’s systems. The breach was limited, but there is still a very risk RSA customers including major banks and enterprises will be affected on a broader scale.

“We have determined that a recent attack on RSA’s systems has resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems,” the filing said, which “does not enable a successful direct attack” on customers but could potentially compromise guarded networks in a “broader attack” in the future.”

RSA described the cyber attack as an “extremely aggressive” one, and an “advanced persistent threat,” saying it is currently working with authorities to go after the attacker.

Security is the biggest factor deterring companies from transiting to the cloud, but EMC is one giant you don’t poke. However, while the details of the cyber attack continue to remain obscure, we can look at some of RSA CTO Sam Curry’s highlights from EMC World 2010, when he talked with Wikibon’s Dave Vellante about the private cloud. He noted that privacy is the most important word and element in private clouds, and that a security expert’s job is not to eliminate the threat but to quantify the risk and make it measurable. Moreover, he also mentioned that security should become built-in and not an add-on.

RSA Executive Chairman Art Coviello said his company doesn’t believe that identifiable customer or employee personally data was compromised.

Cloud security is a hot topic both on the enterprise scale, and on the consumer scale. Commtouch recently reported phishers are utilizing cloud-based document services such as Google Docs to make it easier for them to create, manage and store back-end form data as well as scale harvested data.