One of the worst government data breaches
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The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced Wednesday that some of the information, which was stolen from people who underwent routine background checks, included social security numbers and health information as well. Some of the data even includes criminal, financial and employment and histories.
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But the breach of fingerprints may be the most troubling of all. FiveThirtyEight broke down exactly what a hacker might use fingerprints for in July, when word first broke of the breach:
[Fingerprints] could be used to sniff out individuals operating in a foreign country under false identities. Imagine that you, an American spy, travel to Hackistan ostensibly to work as the ambassador’s dog walker. The Hackistani government grabs your fingerprints when you arrive in the country. But now, after their successful hack, they can check yours against the prints in the stolen OPM database. They find that your prints are a partial match with the prints of a contractor who worked for the U.S. Department of Defense a decade ago. Uh oh.
In a statement, OPM said that “federal experts believe that, as of now, the ability to misuse fingerprint data is limited.” But, according to the Guardian, it also noted that “this probability could change over time as technology evolves.”
Considered one of the worst in history, the data breach has been largely attributed to Chinese hackers, though the Obama administration has yet to publicly point a finger. But with the arrival of Chinese president Xi Jinping in this week, President Obama is expected to urge Xi to take action to control Chinese cyber-attacks on the U.S., adding that “we don’t want to see the internet weaponized in that way.”