U.S. Dept. of Energy reports second security breach

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.csoonline.com/article/738230/u.s.-dept.-of-energy-reports-second-security-breach

By Steve Ragan
Staff Writer
CSO Online
August 16, 2013

In a letter sent to employees on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Energy 
(DOE) disclosed a security incident, which resulted in the loss of 
personally identifying information (PII) to unauthorized individuals. This 
is the second time this year such a breach has occurred. The letter, 
obtained by the Wall Street Journal, doesn't identify the root cause of 
the incident, or provide much detail, other than the fact that no 
classified data was lost.

"The Department of Energy has confirmed a recent cyber incident that 
occurred at the end of July and resulted in the unauthorized disclosure of 
federal employee Personally Identifiable Information (PII)...We believe 
about 14,000 past and current DOE employees

Back in February, the DOE disclosed a similar incident where PII was lost. 
In addition, that incident also included the compromise of 14 servers and 
20 workstations. At the time, officials blamed Chinese hackers, but two 
weeks earlier a group calling itself Parastoo (a common girls name in 
Farsi) claimed they were behind the breach, posting data allegedly taken 
from a DOE webserver (including a copy of /etc/passwd and Apache config 
files) as proof.

In this most recent case, the motive behind the attack may be something 
simple, such as data harvesting, since PII is rather valuable to 
criminals. Or it may be something else entirely.

[...]



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