From: Forbes
The federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has been hacked – presumably by the Chinese –and data on some 21.5 million people has been harvested by the hackers. The agency’s director put in her well-deserved resignation as a result of this event.
In the House Oversite and Government Reform Committee meeting on this breach, it became clear that the information went beyond just standard records of employee’s job assignments, performance ratings, and training records and also included social security numbers, addresses and other information that could potentially be used for identity theft and credit card fraud.
But because this information was presumably stolen by a government and not common thieves, that is not what most concerns Congress. Their biggest fear is that this data could be used to blackmail people to give the Chinese information we would not want them to possess.
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