OPM hack: worse than Snowden?

[Winehole23]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hitting-an-agency-where-it-hurts/2015/06/17/ffca6c6a-1512-11e5-9ddc-e3353542100c_story.html

[boutons_deux]

I read somewhere this morning the crack lasted for about 1 year, before discovery

Repugs will certainly try to cut $100Ms for OPM budget to punish them, like they did cutting $1B from IRS and 10Ks of IRS jobs

[pgardn]

The author makes it sound like the contractor responsible for security was negligent.

I don't know much about security measures to even begin to assess something like this.
Do we really have sloppy computer security in our government agencies while apparently having capabilities of hacking/ espionage that are cutting edge?

It seems if we know how to infiltrate, we should have a good grip on protection. This confuses me.

[Aztecfan03]

The author makes it sound like the contractor responsible for security was negligent.

I don't know much about security measures to even begin to assess something like this.
Do we really have sloppy computer security in our government agencies while apparently having capabilities of hacking/ espionage that are cutting edge?

It seems if we know how to infiltrate, we should have a good grip on protection. This confuses me.
haven't read the article yet, but maybe it was ego. We thought we were safe and we didn't test our systems enough.

[Winehole23]

The nation’s top counterintelligence agency is ducking responsibility for failing to identify or help address the Office of Personnel Management’s poor cyberdefenses before the massive data breach ascribed to the Chinese government, saying that wasn’t its job.


In response to a letter from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who asked what the National Counterintelligence and Security Center had done to help OPM secure its systems or root out counterintelligence vulnerabilities, director William Evanina wrote that existing laws governing his office “do not include either identifying information technology (IT) vulnerabilities to agencies or providing recommendations to them on how to secure their IT systems.”

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/16/counterintelligence-agency-shrugs-responsibility-opm-breach/

[Winehole23]

When hackers steal your password, you change it. When hackers steal your fingerprints, they’ve got an unchangeable credential that lets them spoof your identity for life. When they steal 5.6 million of those irrevocable biometric identifiers from U.S. federal employees—many with secret clearances—well, that’s very bad.


On Wednesday, the Office of Personnel Management admitted that the number of federal employees’ fingerprints compromised in the massive breach of its servers revealed over the summer has grown from 1.1 million to 5.6 million. OPM, which serves as a sort of human resources department for the federal government, didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on who exactly those fingerprints belong to within the federal government. But OPM had previously confirmed that the data of 21.5 million federal employees was potentially compromised by the hack—which likely originated in China—and that those victims included intelligence and military employees with security clearances.

http://www.wired.com/2015/09/opm-now-admits-5-6m-feds-fingerprints-stolen-hackers/