Lockheed: Taking heat for a security lapse
Lockheed Martin, the largest U.S. defense contractor, is on the defensive this week after hackers defeated the company’s computer-security system, said Stewart Mitchell in PCPro.co.uk. The firm, based in Bethesda, Md., offered little information on the hackers’ methods, but experts theorize that they duplicated security tokens that generate a constantly changing stream of passwords. In March, thieves stole a cache of codes for such SecurID tokens from the RSA security division of EMC Corp. Experts are now asking why Lockheed continued to use the tokens more than two months after RSA alerted clients to the theft. At least one other defense company heeded the warning and stopped using SecurID tokens altogether.
Lockheed insists that neither its data nor that of its customers was compromised, but some computer-security executives have their doubts, said Lindsey Robbins in the Maryland Gazette.net. Vaughn Thurman, president of technical consultants Swift Systems in Frederick, Md., said it was a “statistical impossibility” that hackers with sufficient financing and sophistication to break through Lockheed’s digital firewalls would have emerged empty-handed. Any information the hackers obtained, however, would likely be encrypted and difficult to decipher.
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