The Biden administration has been requesting that union bosses, after being appointed to top administration positions, be excluded from ethics rules that bar them from being lobbied by their former union.
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.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is holding a series of emergency conference calls with all departments and agencies of the federal government requiring them to search for and vet “properties to temporarily house [unaccompanied alien children]” because “the need for facilities continues to grow.”
On Monday, an anonymous hacker posted a data file containing personal data on 50 million Turkish citizens, including their addresses, birthdates, and the national identifier numbers issued by the Turkish government.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The first reports of the massive penetration of Office of Personnel Management files and security clearance applications — apparently by Chinese hackers most likely working for, or with, that country’s military intelligence apparatus — included grumbles from the affected employees that the administration didn’t handle the situation very well.
During a previous look at the cyber-security faceplant that led to Chinese hackers running wild in the Office of Personnel Management system, I thought the story of hundreds of millions of tax dollars spent to implement security software so far behind schedule that it is already obsolete sounded uncomfortably similar to the HealthCareDotGov debacle.
The already-terrible tale of the “Pearl Harbor” hacker attack launched against U.S. federal government systems just got worse. The Chinese invaders pulled off a second massive security breach that may have given them access to “sensitive background information submitted by intelligence and military personnel for security clearances,” according to the Associated Press.
China’s recently revealed hack of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) could involve data for up to 14 million Americans,op including detailed information on CIA and NSA agents who applied for security clearances.
The President of the American Federation of Government Employees says the hack of Office of Personnel Management computers is more far reaching that the Agency has so far revealed.
Current and former cabinet secretaries are among the millions of federal employees whose personal information may have been compromised by a data breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
The news about the massive data breach of the Office of Personnel Management, and other federal agencies, by Chinese hackers just keeps getting worse. Estimates of the scope of the breach have increased since the initial reports on Friday, while the ability of the attackers to bypass state-of-the-art defensive software is frightening. Even so, some experts are saying the damage could have been contained if the government had taken better precautions to protect the pilfered data.
The big question about the massive data breach of the U.S. federal government, perpetrated in April but just revealed to the American public yesterday, is whether the Chinese government was responsible.
Contents: Tsipras gives bitter, defiant speech to Greece’s parliament; Speculation grows about China’s purpose in giant government hacking breach
This could be one of the most devastating blows yet struck in the shadowy First Cyber War. The Associated Press reports “the Obama administration is scrambling to assess the impact of a massive data breach involving the agency that handles security clearances and employee records.”