{"id":4885,"date":"2015-07-17T14:02:56","date_gmt":"2015-07-17T14:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/how-the-government-is-recovering-from-opm-data-breach\/"},"modified":"2023-04-18T21:45:08","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T21:45:08","slug":"how-the-government-is-recovering-from-opm-data-breach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/evssolutions.com\/insights\/how-the-government-is-recovering-from-opm-data-breach\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Government is Recovering from the OPM Data Breach"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has released an in-depth analysis and the severity of two breaches that the department has had. Although we have briefly covered the OPM data breach<\/a>, regarding the 4 million federal employees affected by the breach, there is new information, which portrays a much larger and widespread effect. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThe team has now concluded with high confidence that sensitive information, including the Social Security Numbers (SSNs) of 21.5 million individuals, was stolen from the background investigation databases; this includes 19.7 million individuals that applied for a background investigation and 1.8 million non-applicants, predominantly spouses or co-habitants of applicants, the OPM website stated. \u201cAs noted above, some records also include findings from interviews conducted by background investigators and approximately 1.1 million include fingerprints.\u201d<\/p>\n As a result, OPM has created a cyber security plan<\/a>, a cyber security resource page<\/a> on their website, will be establishing a call center and more. The OPM incident shows that any entity with personally identifying data can hold value to a fraudster. Therefore, it is important for all businesses from small to Fortune 500 companies to be proactive in their cyber security initiatives, instead of waiting to be reactive.<\/p>\n Now OPM has to implement all of these additional items that could have been created pre-breach and may have prevented the breach or decreased the damage. OPM\u2019s new cyber security plan includes improvements that vary from implementing two-factor authentication to using standard modern operating systems and educating staff about policies and procedures.<\/span><\/p>\n