Category Archives: department of energy

White House taps Karen Evans as assistant Energy secretary for cybersecurity

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President Donald Trump plans to nominate Karen Evans, a veteran of federal IT security, to be assistance secretary of Energy for cybersecurity, energy security and emergency response, the White House announced late Tuesday. A former top IT official at the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush, Evans has also served as the Department of Energy’s chief information officer. More recently, she was an IT adviser on Trump’s transition team. Outside of government, she has been an advocate of improving the nation’s cybersecurity workforce through the U.S. Cyber Challenge. Evans would rejoin DOE at a momentous time for the department as it looks to execute a new cybersecurity strategy and boost the defenses of U.S. energy companies through an information-sharing program. Energy Secretary Rick Perry has been outspoken lately about the industry’s cybersecurity challenges. “The sustained and growing threat of cyberattacks to our energy infrastructure requires us to think […]

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Department of Energy strategy aims to make power systems more resilient to hacking

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Citing an increase in criminal and nation-state hackers targeting the energy sector, the Department of Energy has released a five-year strategy to cut down on the risk of power-supply disruptions resulting from cyber incidents. “Despite improving defenses, it has become increasingly difficult for energy companies to keep up with growing and aggressive cyberattacks,” the document states. The department is trying to change that dynamic through a strategy to boost threat-sharing with the private sector, curb supply-chain risk, and accelerate research and development to make energy systems more resilient to hacking. The strategy will serve as a roadmap for the new Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, for which President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget requests $96 million. “Today, any cyber incident has the potential to disrupt energy services, damage highly specialized equipment, and threaten human health and safety,” Bruce Walker, an assistant secretary of Energy, wrote in the […]

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Identity Documents Exposed in FedEx-Owned Amazon S3 Bucket

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More than 119,000 scanned identity documents, including passports and drivers’ licenses, belonging to people from the United States and abroad were exposed in an insecure Amazon S3 storage bucket. The storage bucket belonged to a company called B… Continue reading Identity Documents Exposed in FedEx-Owned Amazon S3 Bucket→

Department of Energy would get new cybersecurity office under White House proposal

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A new office would be created in the Department of Energy to monitor and improve energy sector cybersecurity under the president’s proposed budget for fiscal 2019. Named the the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER), the office would “focus on energy infrastructure security and support the expanded national security responsibilities assigned to the Department of Energy.” CESER would take over responsibilities covered elsewhere in the Energy Department budget: the Cybersecurity for Energy Delivery System (CEDS) and the Infrastructure Security and Energy Restoration (ISER) programs. Those programs would see their expected spending go up by about 42 percent collectively and would be folded into CESER. CEDS and ISER have about $45 million and $10 million, respectively, in expected spending in fiscal 2018. Under CESER, spending on those accounts would increase to $70 million and $18 million, respectively. An additional $8 million would go toward “program direction,” which describes efforts to manage the […]

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A Cool Mist that Dries Your Clothes

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This one is both wild enough to be confused as a conspiracy theory and common sense enough to be the big solution staring us in the face which nobody realized. Until now. Oak Ridge National Laboratory and General Electric (GE), working on a grant from the US Department of Energy (DOE), have been playing around with new clothes dryer technology since 2014 and have come with something new and exciting. Clothes dryers that use ultrasonic traducers to remove moisture from garments instead of using heat.

If you’ve ever seen a cool mist humidifier you’ll know how this works. A piezo …read more

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DOE tries to spur development of defenses against Ukraine-style electrical grid cyberattack

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The Department of Energy doled out $4 million in grant funding earlier this month to four different cybersecurity firms in an effort to spur the development of new technology that can help protect U.S. electricity delivery systems from hackers. The move comes just three months after a complex cyberattack aimed at Ukrainian energy company Ukrenergo […]

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