SAN
FRANCISCO – A December breach of government systems containing personal
information of millions of federal employees – suspected to be the work of China – was worse than originally thought.
A union of federal workers said Thursday that the attack, announced
last week, had stolen confidential information of every single federal
employee, past or present – far more than was previously revealed. The
government disputes those claims.
It’s the
latest in a spree of damaging hacks against the government, including an attack
in March 2014 that also involved federal employee records, CNET.Com reports.
Hackers
acting in the name of a political agenda, and those paid by other countries,
have stepped up their efforts to breach U.S. government systems for a variety
of reasons. In some cases, they’ve hoped to embarrass President Barack Obama’s
administration, and in others they’ve made statements about the US military.
Successful attacks include a group that breached the CIA’s public website,
another that took control of the US military’s Twitter feed, and a group that
successfully intercepted the president’s emails.
In this
case, if the union is correct, the hack would be the first to affect every
employee of any organization or company.
The union’s
allegations come a few months after Obama promised the federal government would
work with companies to protect people from hacks and identity theft. Obama’s
administration has since blamed Chinese hackers for the breach of federal
employee information.
“We
believe that hackers are have every affected person’s Social Security number,
military records and veterans’ status information, address, birth date, job and
pay history, health insurance, life insurance, and pension information; age,
gender, race, union status, and more,” American Federation of Government
Employees President J. David Cox wrote in a letter to the US Office of
Personnel Management. Worse, he wrote the Social Security numbers of employees
don’t appear to have been protected with encryption algorithms, a standard
security measure for sensitive information. Cox called the lack of adequate
security controls “absolutely indefensible and outrageous.”
Jackie
Koszczuk, a spokeswoman for the Office of Personnel Management, said in the
Associated Press report that every current and retired federal employee’s
records were compromised was not correct.
The letter
was first obtained by the Associated Press.
The attack
was first revealed last week, when the government said the personal information
of 4 million federal workers had been breached. The union said it believes
“the hackers are now in possession of all personnel data for every federal
employee, every federal retiree, and up to one million former federal
employees,” Cox wrote.
The
government has pledged to notify each affected employee of the hack and offer
services to help counter any abuse of their information.
