Lockheed IT systems breached: report

Aerospace and defence giant and top defence contractor, Lockheed Martin, has refused to confirm nor deny an agency story saying the company had experienced a major data breach.

Earlier, a Reuters story, quoting unnamed sources within Lockheed, said the defence contractor was battling a major internal computer network problem that had affected a "lot of people."

According to the report, the incident had forced Lockheed to reset passwords for employees and undertake other emergency measures. It said Lockheed had notified the Pentagon about the problem.

Reuters quoted technology experts as saying the intrusion may have involved the use of RSA's SecurID tokens, which Lockheed Martin employees use when logging into their network from outside the company.

A Lockheed spokesman, Jeffrey Adams, responded to the story through a brief e-mail statement that the company did not, as a matter of policy, discuss specific threats or responses. "We have policies and procedures in place to mitigate the cyber threats to our business, and we remain confident in the integrity of our robust, multi-layered information systems security," the statement noted.

Earlier this year, RSA, part of EMC, had disclosed that hackers had compromised its networks and potentially compromised data involving its SecurID authentication technology. Since then, a number of security analysts have urged companies using SecurID to review their authentication and security procedures.