The concentrated cyber attack that breached the defenses of U.S. Department of Energy [DoE] last week may be the scariest yet.
Unnamed officials tell Bill Gertz of The Washington Free Beacon that the hackers were only after personal information of employees, and that no "sensitive" information was compromised. Nonetheless, this breach is somewhat more concerning, considering that the DoE is responsible for the monitoring and maintenance of the American nuclear arsenal.
Just as the government officials claim, yet again, that nothing important was lost, they also claim, yet again, that evidence points straight to China.
From the Bill Gertz report:
“It’s a continuing story of negligence,” Ed McCallum, who spent 10 years as the Department of Energy’s Office of Safeguards and Security, told the Free Beacon. The department “is on the cutting edge of some of the most sophisticated military and intelligence technology the country owns and it is being treated frivolously by the Department of Energy and its political masters,” McCallum said.
The breach comes on the heels of several high-visibility attacks— on The New York Times, Washington Post, Twitter, and The Wall Street Journal — as well as the U.S. announcement of a vast expansion of its new Cyber Command.
Heads of state all across the globe have both expressed concern for cyber related espionage as well as put forward legislation to stand up military and government cyber security arms.
Washington has even gone so far as to state that a cyber attack on infrastructure is considered an act of war.
Still, despite what some experts say is a hacking effort only a "nation-state" could coordinate, no hard evidence has been presented to definitively point at finger at the Chinese government.
Nonetheless, teams and companies of information technology experts are working tirelessly to develop the tools necessary to accurately mitigate, identify, and reciprocate attacks on cyber infrastructure.
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