RSA attacked by two groups

RSA has confirmed that a nation state actor was one of two groups behind the attack against the company earlier this year.

Executive chairman Art Coviello said at the RSA Conference Europe that the sophistication of the attack could only originate from a nation state.

Howver he said RSA lacks the forensic evidence to attribute the attacks.

“For us, the breach was a validation of our strategy that a perimeter defence was not effective and that is why we bought NetWitness so that we were able to do remediation."

"There has been no successful attacks with the information and only one incident where the information taken was used in an attack.”

Eddie Schwartz, CISO of RSA, who arrived at the company as a result of the NetWitness acquisition, said that the attackers abused the naming convention and had an understanding of the network.

Coviello later said that two groups attacked the company and coordinated from a nation state, with one supporting another and one that was very visible.

RSA president Tom Heiser refused to disclose the cost of replacing tokens and said supply met demand around August.

“We got to to the top 500 customers relatively quickly and the challenge was to meet the needs of tens of thousands of customers, so we used our marketing and press departments to identify those customers. We could not hand-pick who we went to.”

This article originally appeared at scmagazineuk.com