http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/report-hack-of-government-employee-records-discovered-by-product-demo/
By Sean Gallagher
Ars Technica
June 11, 2015
As officials of the Obama administration announced that millions of
sensitive records associated with current and past federal employees and
contractors had been exposed by a long-running infiltration of the
networks and systems of the Office of Personnel Management on June 4, they
claimed the breach had been found during a government effort to correct
problems with OPM's security. An OPM statement on the attack said that the
agency discovered the breach as it had "undertaken an aggressive effort to
update its cybersecurity posture." And a DHS spokesperson told Ars that
"interagency partners" were helping the OPM improve its network monitoring
"through which OPM detected new malicious activity affecting its
information technology systems and data in April 2015."
Those statements may not be entirely accurate. According to a Wall Street
Journal report, the breach was indeed discovered in April. But according
to sources who spoke to the WSJ's Damian Paletta and Siobhan Hughes, it
was in fact discovered during a sales demonstration of a network forensics
software package called CyFIR by its developer, CyTech Services. "CyTech,
trying to show OPM how its cybersecurity product worked, ran a diagnostics
study on OPM’s network and discovered malware was embedded on the
network," Paletta and Hughes reported.
And, according to federal investigators, that malware may have been in
place for over a year. US intelligence agencies have joined the
investigation into the breach. But it's still not even clear what data was
accessed by the attackers.
Meanwhile, the breach has triggered outrage from unions representing
federal employees. In a letter to OPM Director Katherine Archuleta,
American Federation of Government Employees president J. David Cox
expressed displeasure at the way OPM had handled the breach, calling the
18 months of credit monitoring and $1 million liability insurance OPM is
offering federal employees "entirely inadequate, either as compensation or
protection from harm."
[...]
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