Why were their SS# not encrypted?
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/union-says-hackers-have-data-every-federal-employee-n373916
I’m not going off the grid, but I have started to dial back my electronic presence, as well as my reliance on personal electronics.
Given that there were no safeguards at the level of what is utilized for online banking, some are asking why " it took the Chinese so long?"
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/why-did-china-hack-federal-employees-data/395096/
Since so many people love to deride federal employees, I imagine there won’t be much of an outcry. Except, of course, for those who will wish to use it as a stick to beat the administration with.
I’m a former federal employee. You can’t change your SS#. I wonder what will happen?
It’s not just federal employees. Also hacked were military (including vets) families and anyone who was part of an FBI background check (like if your neighbor was getting a clearance and you were interviewed briefly, your info was also in the OMP and also available to hackers).
Oh, well, if it includes VETS then it will be taken seriously. ^:)^
What’s also mindboggling is that they only found out they’d been hacked after an Info Sec company did a sales demo and ran a monitoring software that detected malware.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/report-hack-of-government-employee-records-discovered-by-product-demo/
Hasn’t there also been 2 major health insurance carriers and some major credit card companies hacked in the recent past. These also have SS#'s.
What a mess.
Well, fair is fair, the US does the same to every other country.
Well, fair is fair, the US does the same to every other country.
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Where can I find out more?
You mean the NSA thing. That’s not the same as this, are you serious?
Oh please.
And it isn’t just my data, it’s that of every person on my SF86. Lovely.
So it sounds like since H had a security clearance since he was workng on special military projects, that his information has been stolen, but how to find out?
EK - they will let everyone know in the next couple of weeks.
Well, it seems like pretty much everyone may wish to freeze their credit with the credit bureaus, or at least all current or former federal employees or folks who have had security clearances. That’s a pretty wide swath of people!
How quickly you forget the Snowden thing. There is no legal limit to US spying on non-US citizens.
I don’t think the issue is identity theft.
Presumably they have the names and addresses of every CIA and military employee. So much for being clandestine.
Spying is different than hackers stolen ID. My kid had a fraudulent charge recently on her charge card, I wonder if this hacking has something to do with it.
So for anyone on here who has gone through a security clearance or even participated in someone else’s security clearance or financial disclosure – what are you all doing? I’m trying to decide what I should do. I mean I’m checking my credit score but I don’t know that that’s enough. Yet I don’t feel like I should sit tight waiting to hear something either bc the handling of this hasn’t been particularly efficient. Should I pay for credit monitoring with one of the banks? I had it with BoA several years ago when I had a w2 get lost in the mail and I don’t know – it didn’t seem like they did much as my credit score hardly ever updated; at least with Credit Karma it updates every week or two so you know they are doing something. When people say “freeze your credit” – how do you do it and do you have to do it with all 3 agencies or just 1?
Recently moved so I’ve had to give out my SS number far too much anyway – everything from utilities to property managers run a credit check.
I thin if you don’t need credit card for a while I would put some sort of monitoring in your credit account. Apparently this is not new, happened a few months back, we only heard about it now.
@aj725 - We decided not to mess around with the monitoring and went straight to a freeze when Anthem graciously provided our unencrypted data to hackers earlier this year (along with 80 million other people’s).
For a freeze, you have to contact each of the 3 bureaus. OTOH it stays frozen until you unfreeze it, unlike monitoring which IIRC you have to renew every 90 days.