Posted on 06/23/2015 9:00:31 AM PDT by dennisw
It gets worse: Federal OPM hack affected up to 18 million
In addition to current and former employees, it appears the records of people who had applied for government jobs were also revealed.
The more we find out about the OPM hack, the worse it looks.
CNN is reporting that the personal data of 18 million current, former, and prospective federal employees was stolen in the cyberattack that targeted the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack.
FBI Director James Comey reportedly gave the 18 million estimate in a closed-door Senate briefing not long after the breach. In addition to current and former employees, it appears the records of people who had applied for government jobs were also revealed.
Sources at other government agencies confirmed to ZDNet that more than 10 million personnel records were stolen.
The revelation does not come as much of a surprise.
J. David Cox, president of the American Federal of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents more than 670,000 federal employees, claimed that the hack was significantly worse than what the Obama administration first claimed.
Cox claimed "all personnel data for every federal employee, every federal retiree, and up to one million federal employees" was stolen. At the time, Cox also said Social Security numbers had been stolen in an unencrypted format, which he described as "absolutely indefensible and outrageous."
Since then, it's also been shown that the OPM badly mishandled its first efforts to protect employees identity and credit history. The OPM and its contractor, CSID, sent e-mails to staffers that made it possible for hackers to launch phishing attacks on them.
That said, as this story continues to unwind, the news only looks worse and worse both for how the OPM handled its internal security and for the federal employees whose records have been revealed.
Neither the FBI nor the OPM confirmed at the time of this writing that 18 million records were revealed. (The CNN report notes that the two agencies did not deny it, either.)
Part of the record keeping and database was outsourced to communist China. So of course the data will be hacked. The Chinese probably had passwords so zero hacking effort was required.
The Federale drones who signed off on this were either bribed or are terminally stupid. Will anyone be fired?
Now they know how the rest of us feel............................
Now China has a list of America’s laziest citizens
LOL. Unfortunately, it's a good spy recruiting list.
This quite possibly affects DoD, US military, DoD contractors, etc...it’s not just about the douche bureaucrat sitting somewhere in the beltway watching pron on the taxpayer’s dime.
Given how eager all the politicians are to cry crocodile tears about cyberdefense, then turn around and cut funding to government IT departments, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising!
What about Passport holders ? Did they get all of that too ? If your government is working against you, you are better off without IMHO.
We have become such a banana republic that by the time it's all done we'll learn that the hackers have the bra and jock size of anyone who asked the post office to change their address.
Admit it. We’ve ALL been hacked and our identities have been stolen. Period. Done deal. All thanks to obama handing over the keys. This was planned a long time ago.
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