Congressional leaders asked the Department of Energy to turn over by Feb. 16 its communications with three national labs reportedly targeted in January by Russian hackers.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was among the labs the hackers targeted by, among other things, creating fake login pages and asking authorized users of the lab’s network to enter their usernames and passwords.
Media widely reported the hacking attempt in late January, at which time the Department of Energy declined to comment about it.
Now, the leaders of the House Oversight and the House Science Space and Technology Committees want to see copies of official communications about the hacking attempt by a group called Cold River.
The committees want to see “[a]ll documents and communications between DOE” and the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Argonne National Laboratory and Livermore, plus communications between those and “any other impacted National Laboratory,” a Feb. 2 letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm reads.
DOE should also turn over communications about the hack between itself and other federal agencies, and any communications with contractors and subcontractors, according to the letter, which was signed by Rep. James Comer (R-Tenn.), chair of the Oversight Committee, and Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), chair of the Science Space and Technology Committee.
