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November 6, 2015 – It has been six months since the Office of Personnel Management announced a data breach involving 21 million current and former federal employees and contractors. To date, only 25% of the victims have been notified that their data was included in the breach. While disappointing, the story is hardly surprising. The government’s ability to store and manage data securely has been virtually nonexistent for the past decade or more.
The data breach released the all of the personally identifiable information someone would need to commit identity theft with every federal employee. And for 5.6 million of the victims of the breach, it also included digitized versions of their finger prints.
At this point, it isn’t even clear that OPM has notified all current federal employees and contractors whose data was breached. That’s downright frightening since many of those employees have security clearances.
What is clear is that OPM has no idea how to manage the situation going forward. Their solution to protect victims of the breach is to provide three years of credit monitoring. Frankly, that’s useless. Credit monitoring only notifies you after your data has been used for identity theft and it does nothing to help you restore your identity.
We’ll keep our readers posted as more news about the breach becomes known.
byJim Malmberg
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Identity Theft 
