RSA has determined that a recent and extremely sophisticated cyber attack on RSA’s systems has resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems that relates to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products. The information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any RSA SecurID customers, this information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack. RSA urges immediate action.
Recently EMC’s security systems identified an extremely sophisticated cyber attack in progress, targeting our RSA business unit. RSA took a variety of aggressive measures against the threat, including further hardening of the IT infrastructure. RSA immediately began an extensive investigation of the attack.
This investigation revealed the attack resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems. Some of that information is related to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products. The information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any RSA SecurID customers, this information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack.
The affected products are RSA SecurID implementations.
• We recommend customers increase their focus on security for social media applications and the use of those applications and websites by anyone with access to their critical networks.
• We recommend customers enforce strong password and pin policies.
• We recommend customers follow the rule of least privilege when assigning roles and responsibilities to security administrators.
• We recommend customers re-educate employees on the importance of avoiding suspicious emails, and remind them not to provide user names or other credentials to anyone without verifying that person’s identity and authority. Employees should not comply with email or phone-based requests for credentials and should report any such attempts.
• We recommend customers pay special attention to security around their active directories, making full use of their SIEM products and also implementing two-factor authentication to control access to active directories.
• We recommend customers watch closely for changes in user privilege levels and access rights using security monitoring technologies such as SIEM, and consider adding more levels of manual approval for those changes.
• We recommend customers harden, closely monitor, and limit remote and physical access to infrastructure that is hosting critical security software.
• We recommend customers examine their help desk practices for information leakage that could help an attacker perform a social engineering attack.
• We recommend customers update their security products and the operating systems hosting them with the latest patches.
Please contact SecureLink in case you have further questions.