Defense Contractor Lockheed Martin Gets Hacked

Lockheed Martin, which is one of America’s defense contractors, was hacked by a group of unidentified individuals. The company first suspected an intruder on their system on the 22nd of May.

Sounds like a Tom Clancy movel

According to the New York Times, the hackers compromised security by using stolen SecurIDs from RSA security. The RSA SecurIDs are USB dongles which generate strings of numbers that are used for cryptographical services. It was also revealed that hackers gained access to RSA servers back in March, and that the same data might have been used to sneak into Lockheed Martin’ servers. The hackers are believed to have gained access to Lockheed Martin’s virtual private network (VPN), with the RSA SecurIDs compromised, the hackers gained access to the company’s servers.

Lockheed Martin says that the threat was detected almost immediately and was thwarted. The VPN services which was compromised and been restored with ‘upgrades’ and additional layers of security. One of the biggest worries was the theft of information related to its projects and other sensitive data, but Lockheed Martin has said that no information relating to its projects, customers or employees were stolen.

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It is not yet known who the hackers were, Lockheed Martin’s IT department once stated that it has over 1 million threats a day, which was filtered down to detect the real threats from what it called ‘White Noise'.

Via: Dailytech