Round up: Livermore in Russian phishing trap; Oak Ridge emergency training facility; HQ personnel move; NNSA Super Bowl sweep

Russian hackers targeted three Department of Energy laboratories, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, in a password-stealing scam, Reuters reported last week.

The news service said the attempts involved Russian hackers creating fake login pages for each lab and then emailing lab employees with invitations to log in to the fake sites. DOE and the labs did not comment on the story.

The Emergency Response Training Facility (ERTF) opened at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., this week, the site said in a press release.

“The $15-million, 40,000-square-foot ERTF was funded by the State of Tennessee and developed by Roane County, led by the Roane Alliance,” the site said in the release.

Effective Jan. 29, ex-NNSA management and budget lead Randy Hendrickson will succeed Jay Mullis as the acting head of regulatory affairs and policy at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.

Mullis, who has filled the position for many months, will return to his job as manager of the cleanup field office at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, William (Ike) White, Environmental Management senior advisor, said Friday in a staff email viewed by Exchange Monitor. With Mullis’s return to Oak Ridge, Laura Wilkerson, the acting site-office manager, will resume her role as deputy manager.

Hendrickson began his civilian career in 2015 after spending 30 years in the Navy, White said. After retiring as a Rear Admiral, Hendrickson joined the National Nuclear Security Administration where he was associate administrator for management and budget. In 2018 he became DOE’s deputy chief financial officer. Hendrickson joined the DOE cleanup office in early 2021 as the deputy for corporate services. 

The National Nuclear Security Administration is planning its latest trip to the big game, with helicopters from the agency’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) set to collect on Sunday and Monday background radiation measurements ahead of Super Bowl LVII.

The National Football League’s 57th annual championship game was set for Sunday, Feb. 12 at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. NFL playoffs were to begin this weekend with the wildcard round. As it does every year, NNSA’s radiation sniffing helicopters fly in a low-altitude grid patterns at and near the game’s host stadium, measuring radiation levels to create a background against which a bad actor’s radioactive dispersal device would stand out on the day of the championship playoff.