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."

Terror strike team...

[packetmon]

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 [informationweek.com] for 26.5 million records, and supposedly the Chinese are ramping up their cyberoffense and defense [fcw.com]. 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.

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? ... Luckily for us Americans, the NSA is snooping the planet [google.com] so never fear they will find the culprits... Unless of course they get pwned too.