The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is sending letters to service members notifying them that their personal information may have been compromised by hackers who breached a computer network managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).
A U.S. government investigation has reportedly concluded Chinese hackers were responsible for the massive data breach of the Marriott hotel chain discovered in September.
A 36-year-old Chinese national named Yu Pingan was arrested at the Los Angeles airport on Monday for distributing the type of malware that was used in the raid on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in 2014 and 2015.
President Barack Obama signed two executive orders on Tuesday about cybersecurity and described his Cybersecurity National Action Plan in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Critics will wonder why many of the ideas in the National Action Plan were not implemented years or
A 20-year-old hacker from Kosovo, Ardit Ferizi, is facing charges that he gave the Islamic State a trove of personal data on U.S. government employees and military members, useful for planning terrorist attacks against them.
The Chinese government claims it has identified and arrested the hackers who breached the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, stealing information on over 20 million federal employees and contractors in history’s largest data raid.
China’s talk of cyber-security reform has not been followed by significant action, according to U.S. intelligence officials. “We haven’t seen any indication in the private sector that anything has changed,” said National Counterintelligence Executive William Evanina on Wednesday, as he announced a forthcoming report on economic espionage in cyberspace.
China’s success at perpetrating massive cyber-attacks against the United States – including arguably the biggest hack in history, the Office of Personnel Management raid – without any repercussions means cyber espionage is here to stay. It’s too easy, too effective, and too deniable to be stopped.
CNN reported Wednesday that a U.S. official has confirmed that “the United States is pulling spies from China as a result of the cyberattack that compromised the personal data of 21.5 million government workers.”
The Wall Street Journal reports on a study from cybersecurity group ThreatConnect and the security consultants at Defense Group, Inc., indicating that China’s military is heavily involved in hacking and cyber crime.
The Office of Personnel Management announced Wednesday that 5.6 million sets of fingerprints were taken in the data breach which impacted 21.5 million government workers. Previously, OPM had said the number of sets of fingerprints taken was 1.1 million.
The Obama Administration has been building up to the visit of Chinese unelected President Xi Jinping by talking tough about cyber-espionage. But the reality behind this tough talk is that Obama will likely let China off the hook for their past actions, and allow China to posture as the world’s firmest enemy of cyber espionage.
China’s state-run news service, Xinhua, lays it on pretty thick in an editorial titled “Xi’s Epic Bid for Better U.S. Ties Bolsters Asian Peace, Prosperity.”
Does anyone in the Administration think the public should have been told their massive Energy Department – which is primarily concerned with interfering with energy production, not creating it – was hit by hackers over a thousand times, and successfully penetrated on 159 occasions? We needed USA Today to choke the news out of them with a FOIA request?
The end of another “red line” farce draws nigh, as China waves aside the Obama administration’s bluster about cyberwar sanctions and claims to be more victimized by hackers than the United States is.
Hard on the heels of reports that China and Russia are busy using stolen U.S. government data to identify American intelligence officers and assets, comes word that the Obama administration is considering retaliatory sanctions against Russian and Chinese targets.
According to U.S. officials cited by the L.A. Times, China and Russia are cross-indexing the mountain of data stolen in the Office of Personnel Management hack earlier this year with other major data breaches, including stolen airline bookings and the Ashley Madison subscriber database, to identify intelligence officials, their agents, and assets.
The Obama crew’s transcendent belief in the power and wisdom of government, which they think should be micro-managing every American business and personal life, is matched only by the staggering incompetence of the hugely expensive government they administer. Now we get this preposterous Secretary of State Kerry glibly assuring us that he writes his mail on the assumption that it will all be stolen as soon as he clicks Send. Not even the Carter years ended with expectations lowered so much.
United Airlines has announced a penetration of its computer security in May and June, with investigators saying it was most likely the same Chinese squad that carried out the “cyber Pearl Harbor” attack on the Office of Personnel Management, along with an operation against health insurance company Anthem. It appears the Chinese raiders made off with a sizable amount of flight information, including passenger lists, from United.
Hackers from the amorphous cyber-crime collective Anonymous claim to have leaked the data from 4,200 United States Census Bureau files.
During Sunday’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, cyber-terror expert Richard Clarke reacted to the recent OPM hack, which is reported to have affected over 22 million people inside and outside government. Clarke did not put the blame on China
Yesterday’s revelations about the OPM hack being six times the size the government originally admitted to was accompanied by assurances from OPM director Katherine Archuleta that she would not resign. Today, she has broken that promise, stepping down from the post.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) argued that the OPM hack has “sort of an act of war” and that there is “sort of this ghost war” involving hacking and security on Friday’s “America’s Newsroom” on the Fox
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has revealed that hackers stole personal information on 25.7 million Americans. That information included Social Security numbers, financial histories, mental health records, and in over a million cases, fingerprints.
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.
It would appear our government has learned the timeless truth that paper records, for all of their many disadvantages, cannot be hacked.
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.)
President Obama is not going to stay in the historic Waldorf Astoria hotel during his upcoming trip to New York, most likely because of the building’s new Chinese owners.
It’s amazing to watch the hapless Obama foreign policy team underplay Cyber Pearl Harbor — the massive Chinese attack on vital U.S. government systems that has put up to 18 million current and former federal employees, plus their friends and families, at risk of identity theft, and dealt damage to American human intelligence efforts that will take years to repair.
Will we now be told the “internal decision-making process” that led the Administration to misrepresent this debacle to the public was also nobody’s fault, mysterious orders emanating from nowhere, a tornado of dishonesty spinning away from a storm of incompetence?
Office of Personnel Management Director (OPM) Katherine Archuleta was unsure of how many employees and retirees’ information her agency oversees and might have been breached in testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Archuleta was asked by Chairman Jason
FireEye, a private sector cybersecurity firm, told media that they believe they have discovered who was behind the massive hack on the federal Office of Personnel Management in which millions of federal employees’s data was stolen.
The Boston Globe reports an astounding admission from Hillary Clinton during an interview with WMUR radio in Boston: the former Secretary of State was well aware that her department was under constant cyberattack, but she broke the rules, and possibly laws, to build a dangerously insecure email server for herself and top aides anyway.
That’s Big Government failure in a nutshell, isn’t it? It’s everyone’s fault, which means it’s no one’s fault. The bigger the federal government gets, the less anyone within it worries about the consequences of abuse or failure.
What if we’d known from Day One that the real number is more like 18 million current, former, and prospective federal employees, as CNN reported on Monday night? Just the other day, Administration flacks were whining that the 14 million worst-case number floated by some security analysts was exaggerated; now it looks like that was a lowball estimate. America has suffered an act of war, but this White House remains more interested in keeping it quiet than dealing with it.
Not only has the American human intelligence system been disastrously compromised around the world, but back here at home, the intel community is going to be playing defense for years to come, worried sick about how many government employees with security clearances might have been approached for recruitment or blackmail by China and its allies.
The bombshells just keep coming in the Office of Personnel Management’s hack, which is bidding to eclipse Obamacare’s launch as the most stunning example of Big Government incompetence in the Information Age. The latest bad news is that Chinese hackers had a full year to rummage around inside the OPM’s security clearance system–plenty of time to take just about anything they wanted.
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.
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.
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.