Cyber Primer

Cyber threats
Annex 2A – Threat actor case studies
Case study 1 – Cyber used for personal data theft
Theft of personal data – United States Office of Personnel Management
Who
What
There has been no official attribution of those responsible, although General
(Retired) James Clapper, the United States National Director for Intelligence, has
been quoted as saying China remains the ‘lead suspect’. According to the Wall
Street Journal, United States government officials suspect that Chinese hackers
perpetrated the breach. The Washington Post has also reported that the attack
originated in China, citing unnamed government officials.
In 2015, the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced
that it had been the target of two separate, but related, cyber security
breaches. In the first event records of as many as four million people may have
been compromised with personally identifiable information such as Social
Security numbers, as well as names, dates and places of birth, and addresses
being targeted. The data breach was noticed by the OPM in April 2015 and is
believed to have started in March 2014, but may started even earlier. In the
second event, identified in June 2015, OPM discovered that the background
investigation records of current, former and prospective Federal employees and
contractors had been stolen. The OPM and the interagency incident response
concluded with high confidence that sensitive information, including the Social
Security numbers of 21.5 million individuals, was stolen from the background
investigation databases. This included 19.7 million individuals that applied for a
background investigation, and 1.8 million non-applicants, primarily spouses or
co-habitants of applicants. Some records also included findings from interviews
conducted by background investigators and approximately 5.6 million include
fingerprints and the usernames and passwords that background investigation
applicants used to fill out their background investigation forms. The theft was
more significant as this was the first event where physical data was stolen in the
form of the 5.6 million sets of fingerprints. These breaches were described by
Federal officials as among the largest breach of government data in the history
of the United States.
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Cyber Primer (2nd Edition)