Lockheed Martin Corp. is the primary information provider and aeronautical manufacturer of the U.S. government, and it announced this Sunday that it has faced a very "tenacious" cyber attack at its network last weekend. It declared that this attack is just a recent part of a recurring pattern of attacks it has been facing from worldwide hackers. The chief information officer of Lockheed Martin Corp., Sondra Barbour, stated that "The fact is, in this new reality, we are a frequent target of adversaries around the world," as she was addressing the employees in a memorandum.
These "significant and tenacious" cyber attacks precisely took place on May 21st, and were instantly detected and countered, though the public announcement is being made eight days later. Bethesda, the Maryland-based facility of Lockheed is still working hard consistently to restore all the consequential affects of the hack attack, keeping the employees’ access to the network still at the maximum level of intact security, declared Barbour. She further informed that the internal immediate reaction of Lockheed was to quickly and "proactively" shut down the virtual private network, or VPN, of the company. VPN is actually a secure method of connecting through to a private network by using either the Internet or any public network in order to transfer the data of the network privately with encryption. Some other counter measures to the hack attack included resetting the passwords of all the users, upgrading the tokens for remote access SecurID and also the addition of a new height of security to the remote access network log-on procedure, revealed Barbour.
Lockheed gave an official statement on Saturday night stating that it had began guarding from the attack right after detecting it, in fact it used the words: "almost immediately." It allegedly took forceful steps to protect its systems and keep the data intact. Lockheed declared that no sort of customer, program or employees' personal data was compromised to any extent. Lockheed is the governments top most supplier. It has been developing the F-16, F-22 and F-35 fighter aircraft, along with Aegis naval combat system and THAAD missile defense.
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel April Cunningham, the spokesperson for U.S. Defense Department also announced on Saturday night that Pentagon is keeping a close eye on the matter and it will keep working closely with Lockheed to measure the depth of the May 21 attack. Though she also mentioned that the overall impact of the attack on the department has been "minimal and we don't expect any adverse effect," she said.
No comments:
Post a Comment