Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
9/11/2015
Department of Energy (DOE) cybersecurity was breached 159 times out of a total of 1,131 cyberattack attempts from 2010 to 2014, USA TODAY reported yesterday upon obtaining incident reports from the agency through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
According to the report, attackers were able to access “administrative privileges to [DOE] computer systems” in 52 of the successful breaches. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was successfully attacked 19 times, while the DOE’s Office of Science was subject to 90 successful attacks, the report says.
Details of the cyberattacks were redacted in the federal documents released via FOIA, and the DOE has not provided additional information on the type of material the perpetrators may have been able to access, particularly with regard to the nuclear weapons stockpile.
DOE spokesman Andrew Gumbiner said in a statement that the DOE “does not comment on ongoing investigations or possible attributions of malicious activity.”
“In all cases of malicious cybersecurity activity, the [DOE] seeks to identify indicators of compromise and other cybersecurity relevant information, which it then shares broadly amongst all DOE labs, plants, and sites as well as within the entire Federal government,” he added.
“DOE works very closely with the Department of Homeland Security, United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, and Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team to jointly protect the DOE enterprise, the Federal Government, and the Energy Sector from cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities,” Gumbiner said.
Gumbiner noted “two significant intrusions” in 2013 “which led to the potential loss of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of former and current DOE employees and contractors” and said that in both cases the DOE “acted swiftly to mitigate the vulnerabilities and remediate the cybersecurity incidents.”
