Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Wired has published an in-depth feature on the 2011 hack of security company RSA, in which hackers stole the so-called “crown jewels of cybersecurity,” the secret keys forming a “crucial ingredient” of its SecurID two-factor authentication devices. It would go on to “redefine the cybersecurity landscape” with huge implications for not just RSA, but also the organizations that relied on its devices for their own security.
Wired’s Andy Greenberg describes the moment RSA analyst Todd Leetham discovered that hackers had accessed one of RSA’s most important pieces of data:
With a growing sense of dread, Leetham had finally traced the intruders’ footprints to their final targets: the secret keys known as “seeds,” a collection of numbers that…
