Lockheed Martin faces cyber security breach

Reuters reported on Thursday that Lockheed Martin has experienced disruptions in its network.

The cyber attack on Lockheed
Officials from the military industry, while speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Lockheed Martin noticed an attempt to break into its network on Sunday. The company immediately shut down remote access to its network.

Company has sent 90,000 new SecurIDs to its employees and has also asked its employees to reset their passwords as a precaution.

Lockheed Martin spokesman Jeffery Adams said that it is the company policy not to discuss particular threats or the response to those.

“However, to counter any threats, we regularly take actions to increase the security of our systems and to protect our employees, customers and program data,” said Adams.

“We have policies and procedures in place to mitigate the cyber threats to our business, and we remain confident in the integrity of our robust, multilayered information systems security,” he added.

Present threat could be related to an attack on RSA Security
The current threat to Lockheed could be related to a data breach that occurred at RSA Security, a division of the EMC Corp.

RSA Security supplies electronic tokens called SecurIDs to government officials and corporate employees that are used for accessing computer networks from outside their offices.

RSA accepted in March that it had lost some of its security products in a data theft. Experts believe that the attack on Lockheed could be the first visible result of that data theft from RSA.

RSA services are used by many federal agencies and fortune 500 companies to provide multilayered security to employees when they access networks from outside their workplace.

Security experts expressed an apprehension that some other companies might have also faced similar attacks but may not even be aware of it.

Several client companies of RSA have augmented network monitoring and/or have changed the passwords and PINs of the electronic tokens.

James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, “The issue is whether all of the security controls are compromised. That’s the assumption people are making.”

He said that the intruder were detected when they tried to transfer data.

Both the Lockheed and RSA declined to discuss the issue on Friday.