An IT Rental Perspective: If Security Industry Vet Lockheed Martin Isn’t Safe from Hackers, Who Is?

Lockheed Martin is a name that resonates with most Americans. It is a titan in the security industry – and it has a respectable reputation to match. A stoic producer of missiles and navy ships, Lockheed Martin manufactures all manner of weaponry, anti-weaponry and defensive structures.

And in March of 2011, Lockheed Martin’s information infrastructure was hacked – an occurence of which the public just recently became aware of.

According to Information Week, the incident exploited Lockheed’s VPN access system, a software designed to allow employees to connect remotely. The hackers used self-generated SecurID security keys by relying on waylaid hardware fobs and a pattern in the underlying algorithm behind the security keys. The fact that security keys were even involved could betoken a breach of EMC’s RSA division, which is responsible for manufacturing SecurID.

This thing keeps getting bigger.

The hackers’ success can be attributed to a blend of IT savvy and espionage – which is a trend we can expect to see continue into the future.

Security blogger Robert Cringely (aka Mark Stephens), broke the news initially, and he added his insight to the matter: “It seems likely that whoever hacked the RSA network got the algorithm for the current tokens and then managed to get a keylogger installed on one or more computers used to access the intranet.”

Lockheed’s officials described the situation as "…significant and tenacious.” To downplay any negative attention, they added that their IT security team noticed the problem “…almost immediately and took aggressive actions to protect all systems and data.”

Lockheed’s aggressive actions entailed making employees work from home, shutting down telecommuting entirely, resetting network passwords and re-issuing SecurID tokens. Strategies which Cringely applauded as “the right things” to do.

The whole situation is a scary one – Lockheed Martin’s security secrets might very well be laid bare. But what’s even more frightening is that Lockheed might not be alone in this breach.

Hacker attacks are not going away anytime soon. In fact, they’re rampant internationally, as evidenced by the Playstation Network’s ongoing outage, infiltrations in the NASDAQ, and a recent attack against Canada’s government.

[Editor’s Note: While we’re just a computer rental company, we rent to businesses – and your security is our concern. So when there’s a matter like this in the news, we try to give it at least some coverage.]