Hackers steal files on 4 million US govt workers The agency tasked with recruiting workers for the US government has fessed up to allowing the personal details of 4 million people to be stolen by hackers. The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has sent out an alert to current and former government employees warning of the data breach. "Beginning June 8 and continuing …
NSA presently is being savaged by the Intercept, the New York TImes, and ProPublica for daring to suggest (probably at the direction of their DoD management chain) that they might be able to contribute something in this area. A principal problem, apparently, is that they might capture Americans' data (some of it their own in this case) while it was being exfiltrated. The articles (at least ProPublica and NYT) indicate the requested permission was denied.
NSA presently is being savaged
The smallest fiddle in the world is heard playing.
Alos, 5 minutes until the suggestion emerges that the breach was actually due to the 5-minute interruption in metadata collection between the sunsetting of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act and the inception of the F.R.E.E.D.O.M. act.
I would think that with all the breached organizations offering free credit monitoring and identify theft protection, I;d think that the average American would be getting these services for free for the rest of their lives.
First there was Target, then Home Depot, the Anthem Insurance, and now this....
They don't seem to know when the breach happened, just that it was before April so the monitoring may be a lot too late. Also, if this agency was responsible for recruiting then they may well have lost data on unsuccessful applicants, not just current & former employees; that doesn't seem to be being addressed at all.
They don't seem to know when the breach happened, just that it was before April so the monitoring may be a lot too late.
The monitoring service being offered is pretty useless in this case. The shelf life of this info is not like for stolen credit cards where after a month or so the cards have been replaced. This is the kind of info that doesn't change over the lifetime of the individuals being targeted. My understanding is that it hasn't showed up for sale, either, which would indicate that the individuals hacking the OPM are in it for the long term, not some quick fix.
"Those who have had their data leaked will be able to receive 18 months of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection."
So the bad guys now know they have to sit on the personal data for 19 months before applying for the dodgy loans. That's how I read it.
Apparently they had some automated hack-detector called EINSTEIN, but similar to the Target hack, if the software is smarter than the humans overseeing it, all is for naught..
These "national security professionals" at the NSA really need to step up to the plate and help defend the country from all these hacks that are only possible due to our broken encryption that they themselves broke.. oh, wait.
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