SecurID breach cost RSA $66m
In 2nd quarter alone
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The security breach that targeted sensitive data relating to RSA's SecurID two-factor authentication product has cost parent company EMC $66m in the second quarter, The Washington Post has reported.
The king's ransom was spent after RSA issued a vaguely worded letter in March warning that undisclosed information had been stolen from its network that “could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack.”
The company came under blistering criticism for not providing additional details to customers, which include some of the world's biggest banks, media companies, government agencies and government contractors.
In a Tuesday conference call to discuss EMC's financial results, executive vice president David Goluden said the company spent the $66m to cover a variety of costs, including transaction monitoring for nervous customers and offering replacement tokens for those who asked for them.
“We incurred an accrued cost associated with investigating the attack, hardening our systems and working with customers to implement our remediation programs,” Goluden was quoted as saying.
EMC also said it alerted customers within hours of the breach and believes that the company was targeted for data on its defense and government agencies, rather than financial information, The Washington Post article said.
Since the breach, reports have emerged that attacks on at least two defense contractors - Lockheed Martin and L3 Communications - were aided by information stolen from RSA.
RSA has yet to say precisely what information was stolen, leading to speculation it includes the seeds used to generate one-time passwords on SecurID tokens. RSA has instead offered customers generic security advice, such as “enforce strong password and pin policies,” and “re-educate employees on the importance of avoiding suspicious emails.” ®
COMMENTS
Where is management?
This is RSA F******in' Security for Chrissakes! I have spoken to RSA customers and they are all moving away from SecurID, as the company can no longer be trusted. Two clients told me they were lied to by RSA staff. This is a Sarbanes offense IMHO.
Don't trust what I say though, do your own research. (CYA alert)
Disgraceful
This incident was handled in an absolutely disgraceful fashion.
It is wholly unacceptable that RSA has not given enough information for their customers (of one which employs me) to assess the implications of the breach and their pathetic security advice is absolutely worthless.
If I were a customer of RSA, I would be demanding replacement SecurID tokens at the very least. Having seen how seriously they care about their customers' security, only a fool would work with RSA again.
Damn kids...
I work in a helldesk. The day after the attack was announced, I said we would be switching from 4 digit pins to 8 character pins. About a week after that, they announced we would be switching. Two days after that, we had 2000 people forced to change. When I sat down to work, we had 125 people in queue for support with the switch. Our RSA system and call queueing system actually crashed that day.
And yet, the company I will not name will not switch from RSA. Rather, they want to switch all ~35k employees to 8 character pins. I suppose it's probably easier to let us poor underpaid helldesk geeks handle it than to just switch to something that works.
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