Because of penetration of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management – Fingerprint biometric information relating to 5.6 million US federal government employees was stolen by hackers, the government agency announced Wednesday. Initially, the estimate was taken as around 1.1 million biometric information leak, but later it was confirmed that the values are higher than of the initial estimate.
Ironically the announcement of Govt Agency coincides with a visit from Chinese President Xi Jinping who is going to talk to President Obama on Thursday. Chinese hackers are widely believed to be responsible for the hack according to various security experts of the US. The security experts consider this hack as one of the major attacks on US security as the data of email address and names could be changed, but the biometric data relating to fingerprints are almost impossible to change.
“As part of the government’s ongoing work to notify individuals affected by the theft of background investigation records, the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Defense have been analyzing impacted data to verify its quality and completeness, During that process, OPM and DoD identified archived records containing additional fingerprint data not previously analyzed. Of the 21.5 million individuals whose Social Security numbers and other sensitive information were impacted by the breach, the subset of individuals whose fingerprints have been stolen has increased from a total of approximately 1.1 million to approximately 5.6 million ” The announcement has been putten up on the governmental site.
Later in the announcement on the OPM site, it’s also mentioned that ” The U.S. Government will continue to evaluate the coverage being provided and whether any adjustments are needed in association with this incident.” which clearly implies that G0vt is not going to take this hack on ease this time.