A year and a half later, we find out…
Inside the Cyberattack That Shocked the US Government
“Everyone can always say, ‘Oh, yeah, the Pentagon is always going to be a target, the NSA is always going to be a target,’” says Michael Daniel, the cybersecurity coordinator at the White House, who was apprised of the crisis early on. “But now you had the Office of Personnel Management as a target?”
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The records that the attackers targeted were some of the most sensitive imaginable.
The hackers had first pillaged a massive trove of background-check data. As part of its human resources mission, OPM processes over 2 million background investigations per year, involving everyone from contractors to federal judges. OPM’s digital archives contain roughly 18 million copies of Standard Form 86, a 127-page questionnaire for federal security clearance that includes probing questions about an applicant’s personal finances, past substance abuse, and psychiatric care. The agency also warehouses the data that is gathered on applicants for some of the government’s most secretive jobs.
inconCEIVable!
Too bad there aren’t user comments attached to that article, there is often some interesting insight along with a bunch of other stuff.
-chris