US Department of Energy hacked, employees’ personal information stolen

According to media reports, the US Department of Energy has been hit by a “sophisticated cyber attack” in the last few weeks, which resulted in the personal information of several hundred employees being compromised.

The Washington Free Beacon, which broke the story, claims that Energy Department officials believe that the intentions of the hackers may not have been limited to stealing information about employees, but may also have planned to establish a bridgehead to gain future access to classified information.

The FBI is said to be investigating the hack, which occurred two weeks ago at the Department of Energy’s Washington-based HQ, and affected 14 servers and 20 desktop workstations.

A Fox News headline on the incident attempts to link the attack to Chinese hackers, but the original Free Beacon report admits that both the source and identity of the hackers is unknown…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.