Hackers of RSA scalp 760 businesses

At least 760 organisations potentially including Australian businesses appear to have been victims of the same attacks that compromised RSA’s SecurID authentication system earlier this year.

The names appear on a list of victim machines that had phoned home to command and control servers used in the March attacks on RSA.

The list was shared by information professionals to US Congress and published by KrebsonSecurity.

It includes security companies including Verizon Australia, eBay, Motorola, IBM, McAfee and VMWare.

Australian telcos Telstra, iiNet, AAPT, TPG, and Macquarie Telecom also appeared on the list but likely because subscribers, not the organisations, were compromised.

A whopping 300 of the 339 command and control servers identified in the attacks were located in China, according to the analysis.

Details of the attack on RSA were not publicly known. Director Art Conviello said last month only that the company was hit with a sophisticated two-pronged attack.

RSA said it lacked the evidence to determine the culprit of the attacks but controversially maintained the compromised SecurID token system did not result in customer data loss.

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