‘Scene of hack at the US Interior is much larger than reported’

Hackers allegedly stole the data of up to 14 million former and current officials in a break-in at a data center of the US Department of the Interior. That is considerably more than what the government itself estimated.

Sources within the US government report this to the AP news agency. According to those unnamed government officials, hackers stole the data of about 9 to 14 million people. This concerns people who have worked for the government or are still working there, and who have undergone a background check for their job. That means that personal information has been collected about them to determine their suitability for a government position; that information probably got into the hands of hackers. The earliest records date back to the 1980s, the AP said. A White House spokesperson could not confirm the report, Reuters reported.

The hack likely makes it difficult for many US employees involved in intelligence-gathering to do their jobs. If the rumors are true, a lot of personal information about American ‘spies’ has fallen into foreign hands: the United States itself suspects Chinese hackers of having broken into the servers at the Interior. With the data, foreign governments could, for example, extort American officials or assume their identity. It can also carry out phishing attacks.

Last week, the US government itself announced that the data of about 4 million people had been stolen. This would include social security numbers and job details. If the information from AP is correct, much more information has been stolen, and from many more people. Some data is said to have been stored unencrypted, but otherwise little is clear about how the hackers got in.