Nuclear Regulatory Commission Compromised 3 Times In Past 3 Years

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been compromised three times in the past three years via email-based attacks, according to internal NRC documents obtained by Nextgov.

The NRC houses data about the locations, conditions, and inventories of nuclear plants across the globe.

Two of the breaches were tracked back to sources outside the US, who used spearphishing messages to coax NRC employees to part with their login credentials or to download malware stored on a Microsoft SkyDrive site. The countries from which the attacks originated were not named in the report.

In a third breach, an attacker took hold of an NRC employee's email account and used it to email malicious PDFs to 16 other employees. Investigators subpoenaed the ISP for records that might help them track the attacker, but the log files for the date in question had been destroyed.