Hacked Federal Employee Information Being Sold Online

The hacked Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) employee personal information database was just the latest Obama embarrassment and it’s a bad situation that’s gotten worse.

The 4 million current and former employees whose information was stolen by suspected Chinese-backed hackers are now having their personal information being sold on a underground online black market.

“The recent OPM breach was identified, noted, and the credentials and identities have been discovered online and are being traded actively,” said cyber security expert Chris Roberts.

According to Fox News, Roberts is the founder and CTO of the Colorado-based OneWorldLabs (OWL), a search engine that checks the darknet daily for data that could compromise security for its corporate and government clients, including government IDs and passwords.

“When these accounts are posted on the darker side of the net, they are usually ‘live’ and are part of a larger breach,” Roberts said. “They are typically parsed out and sold and distributed to interested parties, something OWL tracks.”

Worst still, the hack went way beyond what was first publicly reported according to ABC News:

“If [only] they knew the full extent of it,” one U.S. official said about those affected by the intrusion into the Office of Personnel Management’s information systems.

It all started with an initial intrusion into OPM’s systems more than a year ago, and after gaining that initial access the hackers were able to work their way through four different “segments” of OPM’s systems, according to sources.

Much of that data has been stored on OPM systems housed by the Department of the Interior in a Denver-area data center, sources said. And one of the four “segments” compromised held forms filled out by federal employees seeking security clearances.

U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity say unequivocally such information was put at serious risk by the OPM hack. Of utmost concern are U.S. employees stationed overseas, including in countries such as China, whose government would covet personal information on relatives and contacts of American officials living in the communist country, according to officials.

“If the SF-86’s associated with this hack were, in their entirety, part of the stolen information, then that would mean the potential release of a staggering amount of information, affecting an exponential amount of people,” one U.S. official told ABC News on Sunday.

What’s sad about this entire mess is that Team Obama’s White House counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco recently announced the new Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC), modeled on the National Counterterrorism Center, at the Wilson Center in Washington and was an initiative that was meant to strength intergovernmental cyber security.

“The actions we take today and those we fail to take will determine whether cyberspace remains a great national asset or increasingly becomes a strategic liability, an economic and national security strength or a source of vulnerability,” Monaco said in February.

There’s a cyber war happening in the world, and on Obama’s watch we’re losing it.