The Department of Energy is Under Attack…Cyber Attack

Hundreds of pages of emails released Thursday to CNBC in response to a Freedom of Information Act request paint a picture of a federal agency aggressively responding to a series of what it sees as hostile attempts by private sector firms to access its website at times when market-moving economic data are released to the public.

In a letter to CNBC, the Department of Energy revealed that the federal government is mounting an “ongoing investigation of a confidential nature” into the activities of private sector firms accessing the Department’s website.

The documents released “are records that were compiled for the purposes of monitoring, detecting and enforcing potential violations of certain Federal laws and regulations,” wrote Alexander Morris, the FOIA officer for the Department of Energy’s Office of Information Resources.