The hack of the Federal Office of Personnel Management is having some interesting ramifications
Back in June, many news sources reported that OPM got hacked and basically if you applied for a job with the Federal government in the last 20 years, your information was compromised. Didn't matter if you were a park ranger or an office admin or what, you were compromised. A more recent revelation is that fingerprint scans were also compromised. Bruce Schneier has a recent post about this and the risk of trusting centralized, networked, databases with our information.
Now for a slight diversion.
Salon had a recent article about how a certain KGB agent was amazing at correctly identifying CIA agents in foreign countries. He applied basic common sense and deduced certain patterns: CIA agents when they were undercover at an embassy always had offices in the secure part of the embassy, always took over the apartment that their predecessor had, did not attend certain functions, when they had meetings out of town they were almost always at night during certain hours. But the most important tell of all is that their biographies had gaps. A non-spy in the State Department had a complete and easily verified biography. Spies did not, theirs had gaps.
Back to the OPM hack.
Two days ago, several news sources reported that the CIA was pulling their agents out of China. The OPM hack compromised the full information of over 20,000,000 Federal employees, including CIA agents. China is believed responsible for this hack, so they have all this information. And basically the CIA knows that China now knows all its agents and has the fingerprints for most of them.
If you know who works for the State Department, and you know "Bob" came in to the country allegedly working for State yet he is not on the list of known State employees, he's probably a spy. So the CIA pulled them before they could get caught or in trouble.
If China really wanted to screw with us, they'd shop that list around and sell it to Russia, North Korea, etc.
In other glorious news, Experian was hacked again. This time a specific server or dataset was compromised, and it belonged to the cell phone carrier T-Mobile. If you applied for a T-Mobile line from September '13 to September '16, the following info was compromised: "Social Security numbers, dates of birth and home addresses." But that's only for 15,000,000 people, so no worries.
It is important to remember that it was not T-Mobile that was hacked, it wsa the credit reporting agency/data aggregator Experian that was hacked. When you applied for cell service, you fill out an application and it's run through Experian to determine if your credit is sufficient to pay for a contract. Common sense would say that after the credit is approved or denied, a summary should be passed on to T-Mobile, a notation made on the person's credit report, and the application should be purged. But apparently that wasn't good enough for Experian and they decided that they needed to keep the actual application.
Oh, well.
Now for a slight diversion.
Salon had a recent article about how a certain KGB agent was amazing at correctly identifying CIA agents in foreign countries. He applied basic common sense and deduced certain patterns: CIA agents when they were undercover at an embassy always had offices in the secure part of the embassy, always took over the apartment that their predecessor had, did not attend certain functions, when they had meetings out of town they were almost always at night during certain hours. But the most important tell of all is that their biographies had gaps. A non-spy in the State Department had a complete and easily verified biography. Spies did not, theirs had gaps.
Back to the OPM hack.
Two days ago, several news sources reported that the CIA was pulling their agents out of China. The OPM hack compromised the full information of over 20,000,000 Federal employees, including CIA agents. China is believed responsible for this hack, so they have all this information. And basically the CIA knows that China now knows all its agents and has the fingerprints for most of them.
If you know who works for the State Department, and you know "Bob" came in to the country allegedly working for State yet he is not on the list of known State employees, he's probably a spy. So the CIA pulled them before they could get caught or in trouble.
If China really wanted to screw with us, they'd shop that list around and sell it to Russia, North Korea, etc.
In other glorious news, Experian was hacked again. This time a specific server or dataset was compromised, and it belonged to the cell phone carrier T-Mobile. If you applied for a T-Mobile line from September '13 to September '16, the following info was compromised: "Social Security numbers, dates of birth and home addresses." But that's only for 15,000,000 people, so no worries.
It is important to remember that it was not T-Mobile that was hacked, it wsa the credit reporting agency/data aggregator Experian that was hacked. When you applied for cell service, you fill out an application and it's run through Experian to determine if your credit is sufficient to pay for a contract. Common sense would say that after the credit is approved or denied, a summary should be passed on to T-Mobile, a notation made on the person's credit report, and the application should be purged. But apparently that wasn't good enough for Experian and they decided that they needed to keep the actual application.
Oh, well.