SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the hiring-spree-commences-in-3...2...1... dept.
We had two submissions with updates concerning a US Government data breach.
A second round of hacks have been unleashed upon a vast range of already beleaguered U.S. federal government departments. The attacks again came from hackers linked to China, with the estimated figure upon personal data exposure this time running to about 14 million government employees across records dating back to the 1980s.
With each detailed personal file containing up to 780 identifying pieces of information, the breach constitutes one of the most intense computing blunders in governmental history. Though much can and has been said of the U.S. government's data collection abilities, their data protection skills clearly lack such polish.
Adam Chandler writes in The Atlantic that last week it was revealed that all of the data on Standard Form 86 — filled out by millions of current and former military and intelligence workers — is now believed to be in the hands of Chinese hackers. Form 86 requires that an applicant disclose everything from mental illnesses, financial interests, and bankruptcy issues to any brush with the law and major or minor drug and alcohol use. The application also requires a thorough listing of an applicant's family members, associates, or former roommates so hackers may have not only troves of personal data about Americans with highly sensitive jobs, but also the contacts or family members of American intelligence employees living abroad who could potentially be targeted for coercion.
At its worst, this cyberbreach also provides a basic roster of every American with a security clearance. "That makes it very hard for any of those people to function as an intelligence officer," says Joel Brenner. "The database also tells the Chinese an enormous amount of information about almost everyone with a security clearance. That's a gold mine. It helps you approach and recruit spies."
Meanwhile the number of current and former federal employees compromised has ballooned from 4 million to as many as 14 million. The scope of the breach is remarkable, experts say, because the personnel office apparently learned little from earlier government data breaches like the WikiLeaks case and the surveillance revelations by Edward J. Snowden, both of which involved unencrypted data. "This is potentially devastating from a counterintelligence point of view," concludes Brenner.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2
See our story on the earlier breach.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday June 15 2015, @05:23AM
If you don't want to be covered in shit, don't swim in the cess pool. The US Federal Government has gone past a certain level of corruption from which recovery is impossible. You can either choose to swim in the shit and be tainted by it, or do something else, but you aren't going to turn a cess pool into champagne by throwing in a few clean napkins. You're just going to get your napkins dirty.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @07:11AM
All that you have is words. No actions. No achievements. Not even character.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @11:07AM
Oh, but he has. All 110,187 of them, thanks to Unicode support in SN.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday June 15 2015, @10:46AM
That's why chipper talk about "working within the system to make it better" has gone from the naive, dewy-eyed sentiment it always was to fantastically absurd. It is not possible to patch a system this broken. The only thing you can do is wipe it and do a complete re-install.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by arulatas on Monday June 15 2015, @05:18PM
What about those that did leave? Now their data is out.
----- 10 turns around
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday June 16 2015, @09:44AM
If you can't do the "time" (so to speak), don't do the crime.