6 Reasons Hackers Would Want Energy Department Data
Why would hackers target the Department of Energy (DOE)?
The obvious answer is to steal nuclear secrets, since the agency's National Nuclear Security Administration department is in charge of managing and safeguarding the country's nuclear arsenal. According to security experts, the agency's laboratories, where the most sensitive work takes place, have long been targeted by attackers.
But the breach of the DOE headquarters network in mid-January, which was disclosed in a Friday memo to employees, appeared only to result in the theft of personally identifiable information (PII) pertaining to a few hundred of the agency's employees and contractors. Although a related investigation by the DOE and FBI remains underway, the memo noted that the findings to date indicate that "no classified data was compromised." Why would attackers target PII for agency employees? Here are six reasons --some more likely than others--why attackers might have come gunning for employee data:
