Saturday, June 06, 2015

4 Million Grains of Sand

China now has sensitive data on 4 million federal government employees:

Hackers working for the Chinese state breached the computer system of the Office of Personnel Management in December, U.S. officials said Thursday, and the agency will notify about 4 million current and former federal employees that their personal data may have been compromised.

Now China has better data for targeted spear-phishing cyber espionage efforts, as the article notes.

And they have data to craft blackmail or bribery efforts.

Or they could simply harass and attack those beyond blackmail or bribery efforts.

Yes, indeed, China is taking their "thousand grains of sand" espionage approach up several orders of magnitude.

Even if it isn't China that did this, somebody did. And enemies could buy the data from whoever took it.