Fed Hack Reached 21 Million

Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times reports on the computer hacking of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Federal officials admitted Thursday that hackers got the most sensitive personal information from more than 21 million Americans, further raising the stunning estimate of damage from the cyber intrusion, which has caused chaos at the government’s main human resources agency.

Any individual who underwent a background investigation from 2000 onward is likely affected, the Office of Personnel Management admitted, and nearly 2 million people who never applied but were spouses or lived with applicants also had their data stolen, the agency said.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/9/fed-data-hack-reached-staggering-21-million/ 

Former CIA Operatives Concerned About Personal Data Security Breach

 

Howard Altman at the Tampa Tribune offers a piece on why former CIA officers like Gary Berntsen (seen in the below photo) are concerned about the computer security breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Managment (OPM) reportedly by Communist Chinese hackers.

Last year, former CIA operative Gary Berntsen spent more than a week filling out a 127-page security clearance application that seeks a wide range of personal information. Aside from the individual’s Social Security numbers, it demands names and Social Security numbers of cohabitants, history of arrests, bankruptcies and mental health issues and lists of foreign contacts, business associates, investments and personal information of foreign-born relatives — including whether they work for other governments or intelligence agencies.

“The form is a personal and financial colonoscopy,” says Berntsen, who led the first teams of CIA operatives into Afghanistan in 2001.
And now that information may be in the hands of Chinese hackers, who could use it to damage U.S. national security by compromising American spies and developing a better understanding of what American intelligence and military personnel are doing, several former spies and a Florida congressman on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence told The Tampa Tribune.

The local head of a national organization of former intelligence officers says the hack is further proof that the United States and China are already involved in a cyberwar.

The concern over the hack is so great that on Tuesday the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on the matter.  

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://tbo.com/list/military-news/former-cia-operatives-concerned-about-info-nabbed-in-government-hack-20150616/

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine piece on Gary Berntsen and his role as the CIA commander in Afghanistan after 9/11 via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/08/operation-jawbreaker-look-back-at-cias.html

China's Spies Hit The Blackmail Jackpot With Data On 4 Million Federal Workers

John R. Schindler, a security consultant and a former National Security Agency counterintelligence officer, offers a piece at the Daily Beast on the seriousness of  the computer hacking of U.S. Government personnel records by the Communist Chinese.

With each passing day the U.S. government’s big hacking scandal gets worse. Just what did hackers steal from the Office of Personnel Management? Having initially assured the public that the loss was not all that serious, OPM’s data breach now looks very grave. The lack of database encryption appears foolhardy, while OPM ignoring repeated warnings about its cyber vulnerabilities implies severe dysfunction in Washington.

To say nothing of the news that hackers were scouring OPM systems for over a year before they were detected. It’s alarming that intruders got hold of information about every federal worker, particularly because OPM previously conceded that “only” 4 million employees, past and present, had been compromised, including 2.1 million current ones. Each day brings worse details about what stands as the biggest data compromise since Edward Snowden stole 1.7 million classified documents and fled to Russia.  

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/11/china-s-spies-hit-the-blackmail-jackpot-with-every-data-on-federal-worker.html