Civil servants involuntarily bare all

If you work (or ever worked) for Uncle Sam, it’s entirely possible your friends, neighbors, relatives and even significant other don’t really know what you do. Or how long you’ve been at it. Or how much you make.

But thanks to a hack at the Office of Personnel Management last week, it’s now entirely possible that strangers located 6,940 air miles from Washington, D.C. know a lot more about you, including your name, birth date, Social Security number and, maybe, where you went to school.

The government Thursday reported a major data breach that targeted information on 4 million active and retired federal workers.  This is the second time OPM records have been hit. Records of the Interior Department, located across the street from OPM in downtown D.C., were also targeted. Both are located just a couple of blocks from the White House.

OPM said the breach occurred in April. But, it could have occurred months earlier in the view of some experts.

The breach has been labeled state-sponsored, although some people are reluctant to publicly accuse any nation. Many suspect it’s the really, really big country with the largest population in the world and a great big wall running across it. How and why the data was breached is what officials are still trying to find out.

An outside IT expert told me, “Getting into a system could be done in one of several ways using a combination of social engineering and/or sophisticated technical network intrusion techniques…”

Why a hostile (or even friendly) government would want data on federal workers is easy to figure. For starters, knowing their financial situation, background and other information could make it easier to pick possible recruits/in-house spies. Having their home addresses and social security numbers could be useful too.

In 2012, the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board announced a data breach of an outside contractor that affected 123,000 TSP account-holders. Names, addresses and social security numbers were stolen. The board offered affected employees and retirees free credit monitoring for one year.

Although never officially confirmed, a government official told me at the time that China was the number one suspect.

Chris Finan, the CEO of Manifold Security and a former White House and Defense Department cyber official, told Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller that the similarities among recent hacks are clear. And he said what will be telling is if this new data gathered from 4 million current and retired feds shows up on the PII black market.

Stay tuned. More to come.

NEARLY USELESS FACTOID

By Emily Kopp:

Cockroaches can live for weeks without their heads. Unlike humans, they breathe through little holes in their body segments. Their brains don’t control that breathing. And they aren’t likely to bleed to death because they have a low-pressure circulatory system. Remember that the next time you try to kill a cockroach in your kitchen.

Source: Scientific American

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