This is a bad week to be a federal employee, and it just got worse. The AP is reporting on a second brutal cyberattack on the federal government revealed this week, carried out by the same hackers who reported accessed the records of every single federal employee. This second hack focused on grabbing extremely personal dossiers from intelligence and military personnel.
Hackers took SF-86 security forms, which are 127-page background checks to make sure people can access classified information. Those forms contain a ton of highly personal information from federal employees, including history of drug use, ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, bankruptcies, lists of run-ins with police and past addresses.
The people whose information was exposed don’t know it yet, according to the AP.
The Office of Personnel Management, which was the target of the hack, has not officially notified military or intelligence personnel whose security clearance data was breached, but news of the second hack was starting to circulate in both the Pentagon and the CIA.
On a related note, this is a MAGNIFICENT week to be a Chinese hacker planning to blackmail federal employees for embarrassing personal history.
[AP]
Contact the author at kate.knibbs@gizmodo.com.
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