Arshad Mohammed and Joseph Menn report: When a retired 51-year-old military man disclosed in a U.S. security clearance application that he had a 20-year affair with his former college roommate’s wife, it was supposed to remain a secret between him and the government. The disclosure last week that hackers had penetrated a database containing such…
Category: Government Sector
Japan Pension Service left external e-mail connected after hacking
The Yomiuri Shimbun reports: In connection with recent cyber-attacks that led to about 1.25 million cases of personal data of pension subscribers being stolen, the Japan Pension Service (JPS) blocked external e-mail communications on June 4, seven days after the incident was confirmed, the JPS president has said. While the JPS has explained so far…
Private medical data of 6,600 Texans was exposed on Internet for up to 8 years
J. David McSwane reports: Confidential medical records of more than 6,600 Medicaid patients in Texas were unintentionally made public for up to 8 years via the Internet by the Department of Aging and Disability Services. The agency, which is charged with assisting some of the state’s most vulnerable people, became aware of the breach in…
Feds Looking Into Whether Hack of US Government Affected Private Citizens Too
Mike Levine reports: Federal investigators are trying to determine whether the massive hack into federal systems announced this past week impacted far more than the estimated 4 million current and former government employees already acknowledged by the Obama administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. In particular, investigators are considering the possibility that…
IRS’s $130 million RFP to fix ID theft diverges from governmentwide initiative
Jared Serbu reports: The Internal Revenue Service has notified a relative handful of contractors that it plans to spend nearly $130 million to build its own new suite of identity verification services, an approach that appears to significantly diverge from an established governmentwide program to verify users’ identities. The agency issued a request for quotations…
Data hacked from U.S. government dates back to 1985: U.S. official
Andrea Shalal and Matt Spetalnick report: Data stolen from U.S. government computers by suspected Chinese hackers included security clearance information and background checks dating back three decades, U.S. officials said on Friday, underlining the scope of one of the largest known cyber attacks on federal networks. Of the four million federal employees whose data were…