Skip to content

Tag: Data Breach

Darwin_Airport_Met_Office

Australian Government Hit by ‘Massive’ Chinese Cyber-Attack

Another data point for the ongoing debate about whether China has scaled back its cyber-espionage activities a little, or not at all, since Presidents Xi Jinping and Barack Obama met in Washington a few months ago: the Australian government was just hit by a major cyber-attack, which it blames on China.

ashley madison

Hackers Threaten to Expose Affair Website Users Unless It Shuts Down

AshleyMadison is a website catering to married people who wish to have an affair. They claim to have 37 million users, and now all of their personal data is in the hands of a hacker group called The Impact Team, which is threatening to expose all those users unless AshleyMadison and a sister site called EstablishedMen are taken down.

Reuters/Kacper Pempel

Federal Hack Endangered At Least 25 Million People, and Counting

According to the revised government estimate, some 21.5 million Social Security numbers were stolen by the hackers. The Office of Personnel Management has announced it will pay for credit-monitoring and identity-theft services for all of them. If a significant number of the pilfered identities are used for criminal activity, the financial chaos unleashed will be devastating.

student-laptop

Report: Chinese Hackers Got Into FBI Personnel Files

As always, the breach was hushed up, and its full extent is still either unknown or being kept from the public, including potential primary and secondary identity theft victims. (When personnel files are raided, the friends and family of the targets have reason to be nervous that they might be the next targets.)

REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Files

Office of Personnel Management IT Was Running Out of… China

The government knew security was wide open for years, and did nothing. It’s a wonder they weren’t hacked before now. There will be no “accountability” for any of this. The Obama Administration doesn’t like to concede any sort of error by collecting scalps from inept high-level employees, and it worries a great deal about what some of them might say in whistleblower interviews or tell-all books.

department of work and pensions

OPM Breach Gets Even Bigger: Congressional Staff Hacked, Too

House and Senate staffers were previously told by OPM that only those with executive branch experience were at risk from the hack. Not until today’s House Oversight Committee hearings did the OPM director officially acknowledge that workers from all three branches of government were affected by the data breach.

Reuters/Kacper Pempel

OPM Hack Raises Questions About Cyber-Attack Liability

No one is ever held responsible for failure in government any more; even the most breathtaking incompetence and abuse lead to zero terminations or punishment. Congress is beginning to grumble about hearings and subpoenas, but even those tend to be ignored and subverted in the Obama era.

REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Files

House Oversight Chairman Considers Subpoenas Over Administration Response to OPM Hack

Like the federal employees who have complained of being left to twist in the wind for months until the breach was acknowledged – and then forced to sit through days of stonewalling while officials revised their stories about how severe the penetration was, and how many people were affected – Chaffetz does not seem impressed with the transparency or vigor of the Administration’s response.

Reuters/Mario Anzuoni

Another Hacking in Hollywood?

A number of Hollywood guilds have reached out to members to notify them that their personal information may have been stolen in the recent data breach attack on Anthem.