Hackers Be Hackin': Defense Contractors Breached

Posted 05/30/2011 at 10:21am | by Brad Chacos

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Holiday weekends are dangerous. Even if we took nothing else away from the movie "Independence Day," we got that. But hey, we're human. All those peaceful weekends in the years since the movie came out lulled us into a false sense of security. Then BAM! The OMG h@x0rs struck while we were grilling weenies and celebrating Memorial Day. And for once, the OMG seems justified – apparently, hackers have breached the networks of several top US defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin.

"They breached security systems designed to keep out intruders by creating duplicates to SecurID electronic keys from EMC Corp's RSA security division," Reuters' Jim Finkle and Andrea Shalal-Esa reported late Friday evening, citing everybody's favorite anonymous "source with direct knowledge of the attacks." The defense companies declined to comment on the breaches, although Raytheon spokesman Jonathan Kasle told Reuters that the company took protective measures when the exploit was confirmed by RSA in March. The Department of Defense also uses SecurID on their networks. Nobody knows what, if any, data was compromised.

Its not all doom and gloom, though; apparently, the really sensitive classified stuff sits on closed networks, meaning they wouldn't be vulnerable to Internet-based attacks. So at least the OMG h@x0rs don't have death rays. Yet.