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Nearly a month after news broke of a massive breach at the Office of Personnel Management -- and three weeks after first denying, then admitting, that security clearance information was stolen -- OPM has shut down its electronic background check system. The agency said the move is a proactive step, not a reaction to another hack. In a June 29 alert posted on OPM's website, the agency says, "The [Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing] e-QIP system will be down for an extended period of time for security enhancements." There was no word on how background checks would be handled with...

The largest federal employee union filed a class action lawsuit Monday against the federal personnel office, its leaders and one of its contractors, arguing that negligence contributed to what government officials are calling one of the most damaging cyberthefts in U.S. history. The suit by the American Federation of Government Employees names the Office of Personnel Management, its director, Katherine Archuleta, and its chief information officer, Donna Seymour. It also names Keypoint Government Solutions, an OPM contractor

The federal personnel chief said Tuesday that she does not believe “anyone is personally responsible” for the massive hack of federal employee data and security clearance files and instead blamed the breach on old computer systems and the hackers themselves. “We have legacy systems that are very old,” Katherine Archuleta, director of the Office of Personnel Management, told Senate lawmakers at a hearing on the intrusion. “It’s an enterprise-wide problem. I don’t believe anyone is personally responsible.”

A leftover from yesterday that shouldn’t be missed. As you read this, bear in mind that our leader continues to insist he has complete confidence in OPM and its director. Some of the contractors that have helped OPM with managing internal data have had security issues of their own—including potentially giving foreign governments direct access to data long before the recent reported breaches. A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project “was in Argentina...

In responding to China’s massive hack of federal personnel data, the government may have run afoul of computer security again. Over the last nine days, the the Office of Personnel Management has sent e-mail notices to hundreds of thousands of federal employees to notify them of the breach and recommend that they click on a link to a private contractor’s Web site to sign up for credit monitoring and other protections. But those e-mails have been met with increasing alarm by employees — along with retirees and former employees with personal data at risk — who worry that the communications...

Secretary of State John Kerry said he will meet with Chinese leaders next week for the annual U.S.-China Economic and Security Dialogue and then hold “a dinner at Mount Vernon” for them. Kerry will be hosting the Chinese at Mount Vernon, the Virginia estate of George Washington, less than three weeks after the Office of Personnel Management announced that the personnel files of some four million current and former federal employees had been hacked, reportedly by the Chinese. The secretary of State mentioned his upcoming meetings and dinner with the Chinese at Mount Vernon specifically in response to a question...

Hackers from China breached the federal weather network recently, forcing cybersecurity teams to seal off data vital to disaster planning, aviation, shipping and scores of other crucial uses, officials said. The intrusion occurred in late September but officials gave no indication that they had a problem until Oct. 20, according to three people familiar with the hack and the subsequent reaction by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service. Even then, NOAA did not say its systems were compromised.

WASHINGTON — Intelligence officials refer to Edward J. Snowden’s job as a National Security Agency contractor as “systems administrator” — a bland name for the specialists who keep the computers humming. But his last job before leaking classified documents about N.S.A. surveillance, he told the news organization The Guardian, was actually “infrastructure analyst.” It is a title that officials have carefully avoided mentioning, perhaps for fear of inviting questions about the agency’s aggressive tactics: an infrastructure analyst at the N.S.A., like a burglar casing an apartment building, looks for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the...

An Arlington burial for Jack Wheeler April 27, 2011The murder of Jack Wheeler remains unsolved, but his funeral on Friday might provide a small bit of solace for his family and friends. Wheeler, a former Hampton resident, will be inurned with full military honors in the Columbarium at Arlington National Cemetery. Wheeler was a 1962 graduate of Hampton High School and a member of the Class of '66 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He served in the Army from 1966 to 1971 and spent time in Vietnam. He went on to serve three GOP presidents in various...

Half of Turkey—44 of 81 provinces, 40 million people including those living in Istanbul and Ankara, suffered a massive power outage that lasted a solid twelve hours. It happened on Tuesday, March 31st. It happened because Iran wanted it to happen. The blackout in Turkey was caused by a cyber hack that originated in Iran. This cyber attack was payback, a taste of what Iran has to offer. Everything went down. Computers, airports, air traffic, traffic lights, hospitals, lights, elevators, refrigeration, water and sewage, everything simply stopped. In an instant, Turkey was transported back to the stone ages.

“Part of the problem is that we’ve got very old systems,” President Obama said on Monday, in a response to a question about the recent hack attack on U.S. government computers. He said making U.S. cyberspace more secure is “going to be a big project,” requiring “new systems and new infrastructure.” The intrusion involving the Office of Personnel Management apparently compromised the personal, identifying information of four million current and former federal employees. […] Speaking at the conclusion of the G-7 summit in Germany on Monday, President Obama refused to say that China is responsible for the massive intrusion into...

President Obama liked the idea laid out in a memo from his staff: an ambitious plan to expand high-speed Internet access in schools that would allow students to use digital notebooks and teachers to customize lessons like never before. Better yet, the president would not need Congress to approve it. White House senior advisers have described the little-known proposal, announced earlier this summer under the name ConnectEd, as one of the biggest potential achievements of Obama’s second term. There’s just one little catch — the proposal costs billions of dollars, and Obama wants to pay for it by raising fees...

Hackers stole personnel data and Social Security numbers for every federal employee, a government worker union said Thursday, charging that the cyberattack on U.S. employee data is far worse than the Obama administration has acknowledged. J. David Cox, president of the American Federal of Government Employees, said in a letter to OPM director Katherine Archuleta that based on OPM's internal briefings, the hackers stole military records and veterans' status information, address, birth date, job and pay history, health insurance, life insurance, and pension information; age, gender, race data. "Based on the sketchy information OPM has provided, we believe that the...

The stunning leak of nude and intimate photos of scores of celebrities may reach far wider than was previously known, involving the breach of almost 600 online storage accounts, according to unsealed federal court documents. The "Celebgate" hack resulted in the posting on Aug. 31 of almost 500 purported photos of Hollywood stars, models and other celebrities — including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst, Kaley Cuoco and U.S. soccer star Hope Solo — to the Wild West-like Internet forum 4chan, from which they quickly spread. Apple Inc. confirmed the next day that the photos were obtained through a "targeted...

‘We have a lot of information about people, and that is something that our adversaries want.” That’s how Donna Seymour, an Office of Personnel Management (OPM) official recently described the OPM hacking to a reporter for the Washington Post. As we found out yesterday, in April, Chinese hackers intruded OPM networks and potentially acquired the personal information of 4 million U.S. government employees. So how did this happen? Well, according to an OPM press release, the agency has been upgrading its network security over the past year. That said, yesterday’s press release also notes that it was only after the...

A Pinellas County recovery center's website was hacked by an Islamic extremist group over the weekend. The Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that Footprints Beachside Recovery Center was hit and its content replaced with a message supporting very different ideologies. And it's not the only one. The web page, claimed to be hacked by a group calling itself El Moujahidin, which had numerous misspellings and sentence fragments, threatened to keep hacking if Muslims are killed. John Templeton, Jr. had just gotten back from vacation on Sunday when he decided to check in on the company's website. “Instead of our front...

The ssa.gov website is vulnerable in several ways, and when it comes to identity thief's no one is a better friend or more helpful with validating data or filling in the blanks or even stealing complete Social Security Account Numbers. Social Security Account Numbers are said to be the Holy Grail of identity theft. Stealing Social Security Numbers Hackers may easily steal Social Security Account Numbers from the Social Security Administration's website ssa.gov making Everyone who has ever been issued a Social Security Account Number vulnerable to identity theft should hackers choose to use this attack vector. This vulnerability is...

The national pension system has been hacked, leading to 1.25 million cases of personal data being leaked, the Japan Pension Service announced Monday. In a scandal reminiscent of the nation’s botched handling of pension records about a decade ago, people’s pension IDs, names, addresses and birth dates have been stolen through illicit accesses to fund workers’ personal computers, fund officials said. The data were leaked when agency employees opened an attached file in their email containing a virus.

Your Social Security Number can be stolen in under an hour. And hundreds of website run by the government, universities and financial institutions among other companies are at fault. ... ... ... It works essentially in the following way. Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6789? No! Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6790? No! Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6788? Yes! ... ... ... Very commonly all the hacker needs is: A victim’s last name A victim's birth date A vulnerable website the victim uses. ... ... ... Are any big players exposing SSN’s? I have a list of hundreds of websites who are...

Chris Roberts, a prominent computer security expert, was aboard a United Airlines flight last week when he tweeted about a potential security flaw he found on the plane’s on-board Wi-Fi. Big mistake. Airline personnel saw the tweet and alerted authorities at Syracuse Hancock International Airport where the flight was scheduled to land. Roberts exited the plane and was quickly detained by the FBI. Roberts, the founder and chief technical officer of the Denver security firm One World Labs, said the agents questioned him, confiscated several of his electronic devices, and then let him go. “Lesson from this evening, don't mention...