so help me understand; admittedly I am severely uneducated on this topic. that's why I posed the question to begin with.
the "attacks" outlined by the article are just internal challenges?
it's their own people looking for holes in order to fill them?
Most companies that require insane security have departments dedicated to breaking through security, simply so they can improve. Same goes for those who develop and maintain widely used encryption methods, such as RSA. For that reason, they also pay money to people who find holes.
Some of the attacks in the article could very likely have been malicious, however, if you consider that the method has existed for so long, it is incredible that there's only such a short section about actual insecurities.
what about all the smaller incidents you hear about when online cashiers (ala Amazon) and banks are hacked for login details? Chase and Capital One (really big banks) recently had their customer's email accounts hacked and their login server was down for days.
were these companies not using the RSA system in question?
While that is a huge security concern, it's not a hole in the RSA system, but rather whatever security system they've chosen to employ in that particular bank. Firewalls, to be more specific.
If you would like to educate yourself a little, you should listen to some podcasts from Security Now.
http://media.grc.com/sn/sn-034.mp3
This podcast specifically addresses RSA encryption. It's very interesting, even if techno babble isn't your thing.
Here's the website with all of the podcasts on it.
http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
edit: There are also full transcripts you can read while they talk. Sounds a little excessive but it helps a lot if you seriously want to understand it, rather than just getting a superficial understanding.
http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-034.htm for the RSA episode.
