The US Office of Personnel Management has come clean on the full extent of the massive data breach that it first disclosed in June, and it’s far worse than what was initially thought.
On Thursday, OPM announced that records including data from background checks of some 21.5 million people – including present, former, and prospective government employees and contractors – have been “exfiltrated” – read, stolen – from its databases.
And by the way, that’s in addition to the four million people whose records OPM had earlier admitted to letting slip into hackers’ hands.
Those 4.2 million personnel records – which included such items as names, Social Security Numbers, dates and places of birth, current and former addresses, and job assignments – were actually stolen from an OPM database hosted by the Department of Interior.
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