In 2014, the US Office of Personnel Management was hacked (presumably by Chinese spies), and leaked 22,000,000+ records of Americans who'd applied for security clearance, handing over the most intimate, compromising details of their lives (the clearance process involves disclosing anything that could be used to blackmail you in the future). — Read the rest
The nation-state hackers who stole 5.6 million+ records of US government employees (cough China cough) also took 5.6 million+ fingerprints. But it's no problem: those people can just get new fingerprints and revoke their old ones right?
The second attack is being blamed on Chinese state actors, and it netted the archives of Standard Form 86, which records applicants' mental illnesses, drug and alcohol use, past arrests and bankruptcies and lists of contacts and relatives.
Data from facial recognition scans performed by US Customs and Border Patrol on travelers crossing at an unnamed lander border point (an anonymous source says it's a US-Canada crossing) have been stolen by hacker or hackers unknown.
In 2017 the private credit information of 143 millions Americans was stolen from Equifax. But the records have never been offered for sale on the black market, which is highly unusual. (The only person who has so far profited from the breach seems to be Equifax CEO Richard F. — Read the rest
Nearly 800,000 people are hurting financially because of the government shutdown, according to NBC: 420,000 federal employees must continue to work without a paycheck until the shutdown ends, and another 380,000 are simply furloughed, or sent home without pay (and will, hopefully, be reimbursed after the Trumpian mess over the ridiculous wall is sorted out). — Read the rest
A recently concluded cybersecurity review conducted by the Trump White House and Department of Homeland Security finds most government agencies remain shockingly insecure, despite Trump's campaign promises for super great cybersecurity unlike the very bad hacker criminal Hillary Clinton who bleached emails and acid-washed her network devices, and should be in jail. — Read the rest
Information security is a race between peak indifference to surveillance and the point of no return for data-collection and retention.
Ever since the Supreme Court ordered the nation's voting authorities to get their act together in 2002 in the wake of Bush v Gore, tech companies have been flogging touchscreen voting machines to willing buyers across the country, while a cadre computer scientists trained in Ed Felten's labs at Princeton have shown again and again and again and again that these machines are absolutely unfit for purpose, are trivial to hack, and endanger the US election system.
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It's been 21 years since the Republican Congress zeroed out the $20M budget of the Office of Technology Assessment, a casualty of Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" that deprived Congress of its principal source of technological expertise.
In this Chinese government comic book, women are warned that mysterious foreign strangers who pitch woo at them are secretly Western spies trying to get at their government secrets.
Amazingly, this is an improvement on last year, when hackers took 300,000 taxpayers' records from the IRS.
Maciej Cegłowski's posted another of his barn-burning speeches about the Internet's problems, their origins and their solutions (previously), a talk from the Fremtidens Internet conference in Copenhagen called "What Happens Next Will Amaze You."
22 million Americans' most compromising data (from fingerprints to criminal records to identities of family and lovers) was breached in the Office of Personnel Management hack, presumably by hackers working for the Chinese government.
My latest Guardian column, How to save online advertising, looks at the writing on the wall for ad-blockers and ad-supported publishing, and suggests one way to keep ads viable.
My new Locus column is What If People Were Sensors, Not Things to be Sensed?
“A key Interior technology official who had access to sensitive systems for over five years had lied about his education, submitting falsified college transcripts produced by an online service.”
The compromised data includes Social Security Numbers, Dates of Birth, and Home Addresses.
The new number is a lot higher than the 14 million figure investigators offered last month.
USIS, a major federal contractor that conducts background checks for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, disclosed today that it was the victim of a hack which likely involved the theft of federal employees' personal data.
