Reports of attacks on the Department of Energy raise alarms

Attackers successfully infiltrated computer systems at the Department of Energy more than 150 times between 2010 and 2014, according to a review of federal documents by USA Today that  were obtained as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. In all, DoE networks were targeted 1,131 times over the four-year span.

While this sounds worrying — the DoE oversees the country’s power grid and nuclear weapons stockpile, after all — a few items are missing from the report. The attacks appear to be against the DoE’s office systems and not the real-time systems that control the power grid. Those systems are typically operated by utilities and aren’t directly connected to DoE’s networks. The attacks in the USA Today report are equivalent to the kind universities, corporations, and other organizations regularly face.

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