Chairman Issa to Microsoft, Yahoo: Hand over hack records

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) fired off letters to Microsoft and Yahoo asking them to preserve all e-mails from the personal Hotmail and Yahoo Mail accounts of federal officials who may have been targeted in previous hacker attacks.

Chairman Issa sent a very similar letter to Google Chief Executive Larry Page earlier this week, after the search giant recently disclosed its Gmail service suffered a hacker attack. In the letters to Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz and Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, Issa wrote that recent media reports have said hackers breached the two companies’ systems. He fears these cyber criminals may have accessed email messages of senior federal officials and military personnel. “This development is of particular concern to this committee, not only because of our interest in the broader issue of cybersecurity and its national security implications, but also because of recent news accounts describing a similar infiltration of individual users’ Google Gmail accounts,” Chairman Issa wrote. “Our committee is primarily interested in determining whether official federal communications may have been inappropriately compromised.” In the letter, Issa requests Yahoo and Microsoft produce all documents and electronic records that identify the federal officials whose Yahoo and Hotmail email accounts were believed to be compromised since the beginning of January 2010.