Showing posts with label Alteration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alteration. Show all posts

July 12, 2015

The "Real" OPM Data Breach

A lot has been made and should be made of the theft of over 21 million federal employees' sensitive personnel records and security clearances. 

Everyone rightly, although somewhat selfishly, is worried about identity theft and the compromised privacy of their information.

The government is worried about hostile nation states using the pilfered information to bribe or coerce military, intelligence, high-level politicals, and others to turn and work for them or otherwise to use against them. 

But what is grossly missing in this discussion is not what information presumably the Chinese stole and how they will use it against us, but rather what information they inserted, altered, or otherwise compromised into the OPM personnel and security databases when they got root access to it.

Imagine for a moment what could hostile nations or terrorists can do to this crown jewel database of personnel and security information:

- They could insert phony records for spies, moles, or other dangerous persons into the database--voila, these people are now "federal employees" and perhaps with stellar performance records and high level security clearances able to penetrate the depths of the federal government with impunity or even as superstars!

- They could alter personnel or security records taking prominent or good government employees and sabotaging them to have questionable histories, contacts, financial, drug or criminal problems and thereby frame or take-down key government figures or divert attention from the real bad guys out there and tie our homeland security and law enforcement establishment in knots chasing after phony leads and false wrongdoers and villains.

Given that the timeline of the hack of OPM goes back to March and December 2014, this was more than enough time for our adversary to not only do to our data what they want, but also for the backup tapes to be affected by the corrupt data entering the system. 

The damage done to U.S. national security is unimaginable. As is typically the case with these things, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Instead of investing in security, now we can invest in "credit monitoring and identity theft protection" for a very sparse three years, while federal employees will go a lifetime in information jeopardy, and the federal government will be literally chasing its tail on personnel security for decades to come. 

With the price so low to our adversaries in attacking our systems, it truly is like stealing and much more. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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