In addition to posting the chairman’s letter, the company submitted a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in which it stated that it did not expect the theft to have a financial shop online 2011 impact. RSA was founded in 1982 by a small group of technologists who at times were actively opposed by the National Security Agency, which was trying to limit the spread of sophisticated cryptography technology. In 2009, the company said publicly that its SecurID system was being used by 40 million customers. Last year it said its technology was used to secure the identities and assets of more than 250 million people.Despite the lack of detail, several computer security specialists said the breach could pose a real threat to companies and government agencies who rely on the technology. One possibility, said Whitfield Diffie, a computer security specialist who was an inventor of cryptographic systems now widely used in electronic commerce, is that a “master key” — a large secret number used as part of the encryption algorithm — might have been stolen. The worst case, he said, would be that the intruder could produce cards that power balanceduplicate the ones supplied by RSA, making it possible to gain access to corporate networks and computer systems. Mr. Diffie is vice president for information security and cryptography at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. “We took a variety of aggressive measures against the threat to protect our business and our customers, including further hardening of our I.T. infrastructure,” Mr. Coviello said. “We also immediately began an extensive investigation of the attack and are working closely with the appropriate authorities.” Company officials did not return phone calls seeking cheap power balancecomment on Thursday.
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