Hackers breached the computers of the U.S. government agency that collects personnel information for federal workers in a massive cyber attack that compromised the data of about 4 million current and former employees, U.S. officials said on Thursday.
A U.S. law enforcement source told Reuters a foreign entity or government was believed to be behind the cyber intrusion against the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and media reports said authorities suspected it originated in China.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had launched a probe and would hold the culprits accountable.
The breach affected OPM’s IT systems and its data stored at the Department of the Interior’s data center, which is a shared service center for federal agencies, a DHS official said on condition of anonymity. The official would not comment on whether other agencies’ data had been affected.
“The last few months have seen a series of massive data breaches that have affected millions of Americans,” U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement.
But he called the latest intrusion “among the most shocking because Americans may expect that federal computer networks are maintained with state of the art defenses.”
“It’s clear that a substantial improvement in our cyber databases and defenses is perilously overdue,” Schiff added.
Reuters