OPM Breach Fallout Grows as Imperatis Bails on the Clean-Up

SAN FRANCISCO, May 24, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The OPM breach continues to make headlines. In June 2015, the U.S. government's Office of Personnel Management (OPM) discovered that the background investigation records of 21.5 million current, former, and prospective federal employees and contractors had been stolen. Much of the hacked information was highly sensitive, including Social Security numbers, fingerprints, and information on drug and mental-health histories. The mess got even messier in May 2016, when Imperatis, a contractor hired to help modernize the OPM's IT infrastructure, cited financial problems and stopped working without completing the job. As Violet Blue (@violetblue) summed it up in a post on Peerlyst (https://www.peerlyst.com), "As befits every story about the OPM and cybersecurity, the tale is twisted."

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As the Engadget journalist and author unspools some of those twists in her piece: "On one hand, we have yet to understand just how bad the OPM hack—certainly facilitated by the agency's own cybersecurity negligence—has hurt people, put them at risk, or gotten them killed. On the other hand, the never-ending, full-on rolling disaster of OPM's year-long InfoSec debacle has become more fascinatingly absurd than a Monty Python skit. And it just keeps going."

She describes the murky origins of the Imperatis contract, as well as the fact that under a previous name, Jorge Scientific, company employees working on Army contracts were recorded in videos as they got drunk and shot heroin on the job. To see Blue's full post on Peerlyst, go here: https://www.peerlyst.com/posts/opm-s-rolling-cybersecurity-disaster-continues-violet-blue.

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SOURCE Peerlyst