Hackers have personnel data on every federal employee

[L-Pink]

WASHINGTON (AP) ? 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.


"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."

"We believe that Social Security numbers were not encrypted, a cybersecurity failure that is absolutely indefensible and outrageous," the letter said.

"Based on the sketchy information OPM has provided, we believe that the Central Personnel Data File was the targeted database, and that the hackers are now in possession of all personnel data for every federal employee, every federal retiree, and up to one million former federal employees."




Union: Hackers have personnel data on every federal employee - Yahoo Finance


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[Barry-xlovecam]

"We believe that Social Security numbers were not encrypted, a cybersecurity failure that is absolutely indefensible and outrageous," the letter said.

We believe ... Why, are the federal bosses really that stupid?

(That may be a rhetorical question.)

[sandman!]

[just a punk]

Originally Posted by Barry-xlovecam

We believe ... Why, are the federal bosses really that stupid?

(That may be a rhetorical question.)

Most of people think of them like of some super humans, but they are not. For example, there are forums where you can get internal email databases of secret service departments. And that's not all... This is the popular public site right in the .ru domain zone which is controlled by our government: Анонимный интернационал - use Google translate to read it. The same applies to the USA and all other countries. If you want to find their dirty clothes, you'll find it. Here you go: https://wikileaks.org/index.en.html - yep, this site is still up and not closed.

Even the most evil presidents of the mos evil countries can't keep their secrets anymore. There are 100's of sites which share their personal correspondence. Even Obama's Google searches are being traced by... oops GOOGLE ))

[Grapesoda]

Originally Posted by L-Pink

WASHINGTON (AP) ? 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.


"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."

"We believe that Social Security numbers were not encrypted, a cybersecurity failure that is absolutely indefensible and outrageous," the letter said.

"Based on the sketchy information OPM has provided, we believe that the Central Personnel Data File was the targeted database, and that the hackers are now in possession of all personnel data for every federal employee, every federal retiree, and up to one million former federal employees."




Union: Hackers have personnel data on every federal employee - Yahoo Finance


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china

[MiamiBoyz]

I think that it is only fair that if the US government has all of the data on US (spying illegally) that hackers should have just as much "right" to have data on people working for the US government!

[Barry-xlovecam]

Originally Posted by Barry-xlovecam

We believe ... Why, are the federal bosses really that stupid?

(That may be a rhetorical question.)

Turns out he was right

Encryption ''would not have helped'' at OPM, says DHS official | Ars Technica

[B]ut when pressed on why systems had not been protected with encryption prior to the recent discovery of an intrusion that gave attackers access to sensitive data on millions of government employees and government contractors, she said, "It is not feasible to implement on networks that are too old." She added that the agency is now working to encrypt data within its networks. ...
... ... (*House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah)) Chaffetz pointed out in his opening statement that for the past eight years, according to OPM's own Inspector General reports, "OPM's data security posture was akin to leaving all your doors and windows unlocked and hoping nobody would walk in and take the information."

They go on to say this sensitive data was stored on a 20 year old system written in COBOL

He asked Seymour pointedly about the legacy systems that had not been adequately protected or upgraded. Seymour replied that some of them were over 20 years old and written in COBOL, and they could not easily be upgraded or replaced. These systems would be difficult to update to include encryption or multi-factor authentication because of their aging code base, and they would require a full rewrite.

But the government can spend $85 million a copy on new fighter jets