Free Republic

Details about the recent cyber attacks against security firm RSA suggest the assailants may have been taunting the industry giant and the United States while they were stealing secrets from a company whose technology is used to secure many banks and government agencies. Earlier this month, RSA disclosed that “an extremely sophisticated cyber attack” targeting its business unit “resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems that relates to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products.” The company was careful to caution that while data gleaned did not enable a successful direct attack on any of its SecurID customers, the information...

Sophisticated hackers broke into security company RSA's servers and stole data related to SecurID authentication tokens, the firm's head announced late Thursday. The tokens are used by an estimated 40 million employees of large corporations and organizations. They generate a seemingly random six-digit number every 30 or 60 seconds, which the employees type in to log into virtual private networks or other sensitive systems. The RSA cryptography algorithm, which uses a 128-bit "seed" unique to each token to generate the numbers, is virtually impossible to crack. An estimated 250 million smartphones use similar RSA software to verify identity. "Recently, our...