Six us nuclear Safety Agency (NNSA) agencies were affected by APT hackers

A supercomputer used by the U.S. Department of Energy to simulate a nuclear bomb attack.

The APT hacker group behind the SolarWinds leak also broke into the systems of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which maintains the NATION’s Nuclear weapons stockpile, the DEPARTMENT of Energy confirmed on Thursday.

The Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, have evidence that hackers accessed their networks as part of a massive espionage operation that affected at least half a dozen federal agencies, according to Politico, citing officials with direct knowledge of the matter.

A preliminary investigation by the Department of Energy found suspicious activity in the network of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, D.C., the NNSA’s Office of Secure Transportation, and the Department of Energy’s Richmond field offices.

Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said the investigation had found that the malware did not penetrate critical defense systems, including the National Nuclear Security Administration, and that the hackers had only penetrated business networks.

“When the Department of Energy identified vulnerable software, it took immediate action to mitigate the risk, and all software identified as vulnerable to this attack was disconnected from the Department’s network.” Haines said in a statement.

The hackers first gained access to the federal agency network through the hacking software company SolarWinds, which sells IT management products to hundreds of government and private sector customers.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an updated alert regarding SolarWinds earlier On Thursday, saying the APT hacking group posed “significant” risks to government and private networks.

The APT hacker group, which has been hacking into U.S. networks on a massive scale since at least March 2020, has been using it to hack U.S. government agencies, critical infrastructure entities and private companies.

CISA said the hackers showed patience, resources and focus on the attack, and they had been operating on the victim network for a long time. And when they did, the hackers used sophisticated techniques that made the threat difficult to detect and hard to remove.

SolarWinds is a provider of network services to the U.S. Military, and the Dominion, a voting machine company.