RSA Blames Nation State For Cyber Attack 145
An anonymous reader writes "Security firm RSA has revealed that it believes two groups, working on behalf of a single nation state, hacked into its servers and stole information related to the company's SecurID two-factor authentication products. Speaking at the RSA Security Conference in London, RSA executive chairman Art Coviello described the high profile attack thus: 'There were two individual groups from one nation state, one supporting the other. One was very visible and one less so. We've not attributed it to a particular nation state although we're very confident that with the skill, sophistication and resources involved it could only have been a nation state.' Sophos security researcher Graham Cluley questions how RSA has concluded that a country was responsible for the attack — when RSA is unwilling to name who it suspects. Could it be that the firm is simply applying spin, describing the attack as a 'highly sophisticated Advanced Persistent Threat' to protect its image?"
Re:Everyone's going to accuse (Score:5, Interesting)
China's active in this stuff, as is North Korea, several former Soviet Republics, Israel, Western Europe, and most of South America. Well, to be honest, most of the planet, but everywhere else is where some proxies are. You might as well say "I don't know".
The nation-state claim is based on depth of analysis of technologies, leveraging of classified information not known to be leaked, sophistication of attacks. Also maybe on RSA's desire to say "What can we do against a the dedicated resources of a nation-state?"
This idea basically says Uncle Sam doesn't have any folks trolling the dark side of the Internet yet, where folks from all over freely share all sorts of amazing shit. They still don't get it. The dark side is where a lot of really interesting data warehouse technologies come from, years later. Most of these geeks aren't into it to do crime - it's just where the algorithm action is.
It doesn't require a nation-state's resources to do this. Fifty thousand geeks in their mom's basement will do if a hundred of them are Aspies - and they are. They'll do it for the lulz, and on their backtrace they'll drag a red herring across a nation state if it amuses them to do so. Or they'll taint the Church of Scientology instead if that's their thing this week. It would take a nation-state to fund that level of effort, to coordinate that level of action - unless they do it for free for the lulz and the aspies organize it for them for free because it's a puzzle worthy of their attention. No resources are required except the neighbor's open Wifi because Mom provides the Hot Pockets and Mountain Dew.
/Not saying it wasn't a nation-state, but have no faith in the analysis.