Attacks spike against Lockheed Martin

Defence contractor Lockheed Martin has reported a ‘dramatic growth' in the number and sophistication of cyber attacks on its networks.

The attacks were "international" and targeted against Lockheed suppliers to gain access to information since the company had fortified its own networks, the company told Reuters.

Chief information security officer Chandra McMahon said about 20 per cent were advanced persistent threats which had increased dramatically over the last few years.

Pentagon cyber crime centre program director Rohan Amin said internal analysis showed that the number of campaigns had grown adding that multiple campaigns were often linked.

The CISO said the 2011 attack on RSA in which LockHeed Martin was targeted, was due to the compromise of another, as yet unidentified, company.

Lockheed Martin said customer, program and employee personal data was not compromised in that attack which was detected "almost immediately".

“The adversary was able to get information from RSA and then they were also able to steal information from another supplier of ours, and they were able to put those two pieces of information together and launch an attack on us,” McMahon said.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineuk.com