Advanced Persistent Threats Against Rsa Tokens

Advanced Persistent Threats Against RSA Tokens

Marilyn Washington

Dr. Gideon U. Nwatu

CIS 502

October 20, 2013

Abstract

The topic of this paper is “Advanced Persistent Threats Against RSA Tokens.” When we stand back and look at the various cyber threats that are currently being employed in the world, and attempt to prioritize those threats, you will quickly see that most serious threat seems to emanate from a family of viruses called Advanced Persistent Threat (APT); it is this virus type which seems to poses the greatest risk towards the United States. This is the type of threat that is currently being used against the United States by hostile governments around the world. However this is also the class of virus that it being used by the United States to conduct cyber operations against nations that pose a threat to the United States or its allies.

Advanced Persistent Threats Against RSA Tokens

I had to ask myself, what is the Advance Persistent Threat (APT)? According to the website Dambella the APT is defined as a “cybercrime category of malware that is directed at business and political targets. APTs require a high degree of stealithiness over a prolonged duration of operation in order to be successful. The attack objectives therefore typically extend beyond immediate financial gain, and compromised systems continue to be of service even after key systems have been breached and initial goals reached.”

Now that I was able to understand it analyzing the APT Summit Findings article as well as the RSA Security Brief article and identify the vulnerabilities that existed in the system.

RSA security held an analyst conference to provide more details on the recent security breach and subsequent investigation in 2011. RSA provided a bit more detail on the “Advanced Persistent Threat”, the actual root cause of the security breach. Apparently, cyber criminals did a lot of intelligence gathering on employees. APTs often piggyback on employee...