UPDATED 12:17 EST / JULY 28 2011

NEWS

EMC Layout on Compromised RSA Amounted to $66 Million

EMC’s earnings call Tuesday reveals that the company layout amounted to $66 million in the second quarter because of the cyber attack to its RSA Security Division. The cash was spent on transaction monitoring to regain the confidence of its customers wary on the RSA security tokens, as well as on offering replacements to companies that requested them.

“We incurred an accrued cost associated with investigating the attack, hardening our systems and working with customers to implement our remediation programs,” said EMC’s executive vice president David Goluden.

The breach at RSA happened on March. While the hackers failed to compromise valuable corporate and government data, they were able to steal vital information on SecurID, an EMC security tool. The attack is an ATP or Advanced Persistent Threat. Google and the Canadian government suffered from the same cyber assault as well.

RSA security tokens have been long considered the gold-standard for protecting sensitive data. The attack compromised 40 million RSA tokens which safeguard sensitive military and financial networks. EMC say they were able to alert customers of the breach while the attack was being carried out. Contrary to the initial belief, EMC says the attack was aiming for defense and government agencies information. The attack was also said to have inspired the breaches to defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Northop Grumman. There’s a connection the exists between the highlighted intrusions.

Lockheed Martin is the larget US defense contractor which suffered disruptions thought due to RSA SecurID tokens last May. It has to take down its VPN offline in order to explore the unusual lagging. The same goes for Northop Grumman who shut down their remote access network without a warning, unknown even to its senior managers, to investigate.

“It’s not classified data, but more proprietary and personal data that’s at issue,” said one defense industry official familiar with the breach. Among powerful clients, there are Social Security Administration and the Defense Department and its service branches.


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