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Nuclear Agency Worker Information Hacked
Juha-Matti Laurio writes to mention a Reuters report about a fairly worrying case of identity theft. A determined hacker gained access to the U.S. National Nuclear Safety Administration's records and made off with the information for over 1,500 employees and contractors. From the article: "The incident happened last September but top Energy Department officials were not told about it until this week, prompting the chairman of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee to demand the resignation of the head of the NNSA. An NNSA spokesman was not available for comment."
Shouldn't be too hard to track down now, though. Phew!
The NNSA is a semi-autonomous arm of the Energy Department and also guards some of the U.S. military's nuclear secrets and responds to global nuclear and radiological emergencies. So I wonder... How long will it be before someone actually utilitizes some of the information that's being stolen. We already know the military was hit for 26.5 million records, and supposedly the Chinese are ramping up their cyberoffense and defense. I'm wondering how long will it be before the ultimate "so that's what they wanted that information for" scenario comes about. It's sickening to see a country that can supposedly defend itself and the world, can't even secure their own networks. Last thing that needs to happen is this new NSA snooping database to get owned as well.
... Luckily for us Americans, the NSA is snooping the planet so never fear they will find the culprits... Unless of course they get pwned too.
So here would be the nightmare scenario in my eyes... Hackers get DoD information from those 26.5 million VA database and slowly poison them... While the US is straddled in Iraq militarily, some country starts kidnapping those on the NNSA's list and either killing them or torturing them for information (schematics to facilities, etc.) while all this is going on, someone strikes inside the US on such a big scale, Hiroshima looks like a mild 4th of July show.... Scary isn't it?
Infiltrated dot Net
This story reports things quite out of context, the more I find myself directly involved with things in the news, the more I realize its all bullshit.
Here's the actual scoop, I work as an incident response investigator for the NNSA. There are two issues being confused and placed into one, there was an incident last September, it continues on now as a series of incidents that all mesh together as being from the same source- why haven't there been arrests and such? because it requires the cooperation of the foreign nation in question. Last month a service center in new mexico was broken into as part of the larger incident. This was a result of an attack using zero-day that at the moment is still unpatchable (no patch exists).
This is what is now being reported as a result of congressional hearings that took place. The information itself was not stolen almost a year ago, but rather less than a month ago, but the incident as a whole has been going on much longer than that. Alarms went up all over the place when this occured and everyone with a need to know was informed.
So to summarize, two related incidents, the first starting last September, and one occuring last month. The personal data was taken last month as part of the larger incident but is being reported as the data was stolen in september, which is incorrect.