A phishing campaign is targeting some of the 22 million victims of the massive United States Office of Personnel Management breaches of 2014 and 2015.
Tag Archives: Office of Personnel Management
Office of Personal Management Hacked – US Government Downplays the Event
The second admission followed a week later. The Office of Personel Management (OPM) announced that on June 4, a hack attack had succeeded on governmental staff – four million people affected. It now appears that an additional 18 million records were stolen. The government, communicated this as two separate events in an apparent attempt to downplay the scale.
So what happened in the alleged second hack? That 18 million Social Security numbers have been compromised, is a “preliminary, unverified, approximate” according to a letter from the Director of OPM, Katherine Archuleta. The number — 18 million – affects people working for a federal agency or who applied for funding. The data, according to US government circles, may be in the hands of spies from the People’s Republic of China. This has been flatly denied by Chinese officials.
Mrs. Archuleta was called to testify before a Congressional committee: Encryptions are not always possible due to the age of facilities. She argued, however, that even encryption would have not sufficed, because the hackers would then have copied keys and passwords.
An article from the Wall Street Journal mentions that the government described the attack as happening in two waves in orde rto downlplay the severity. In addition, the OPM had denied the disclosure of sensitive information twice, even though the FBI had informed the OPM on June 5 about the attack…
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OPM: Are Personnel Records of All Fed Workers Exposed?
Two weeks ago OPM, the US Office of Personnel Management got hacked and the information of 4 million federal government workers was exposed. This is of course, horrible. But it’s not all: On Friday we learned that the issue at hand was huge and much bigger than everyone believed at first.
As can be read in a letter to OPM Director Karen Archuletta, David Cox, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, believes that “based on the sketchy information OPM has provided, the Central Personnel Data Files was the targeted database, and 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.”
Cox goes on and says that the thinks the hackers have the Social Security number, military records and even veterans status’ information of every affected person. Addresses, birth dates, job and pay histories, health and life insurances and pension information, age, gender, and almost everything else you’d never want anyone else to know are included on his list as well.
Sounds bad? It’s not all. The letter states: “Worst, we believe that Social Security numbers were not encrypted, a cybersecurity failure that is absolutely indefensible and outrageous.”
I bet they now wish that “only” 4 million records got stolen … 
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