US nuclear weapons lab says 67 of its computers are missing
14 Feb 2009
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the premier US nuclear weapons laboratory, has lost track of 67 of its computers with 13 of them having disappeared over the past year alone and 3 of them stolen from a scientist's home in Santa Fe as recently as last month, according to a memo by the Project on Government Oversight watchdog.
The watchdog group obtained and released to the public an internal memo written by the Energy Department to Los Alamos officials about the loss of the 67 computers, which came to light while conducting an investigation into the recent theft of 3 computers from the scientist's home.
POGO, also said that the Los Alamos Site Office (LASO) was disturbed with LANL's decision to treat the lost computers only as a property theft issue, and not as a potential lapse in cyber security more so when only one of the three computers had authorisation for home use.
Los Alamos is one of two laboratories in the US where highly classified work on design of nuclear weapons among others is carried out and is credited with developing the world's first nuclear weapon under the 'Manhattan Project'
Los Alamos officials denied that any of the missing computers had any classified information, but Kevin Roark, a spokesman for NANL confirmed the computers were missing and said the lab has started taking an inventory to account for every computer.
According to NANL, an employee had also lost a blackberry "in a sensitive foreign country" recently while on vacation but refused to divulge which country.
Roark also acknowledged that the missing computers posed a cyber security risk since they may contain personal information like names and addresses but emphasised that computers with classified information were kept completely separate from unclassified computing.
