Hackers with suspected links to China
appear to have accessed sensitive
background information submitted by
intelligence and military personnel for
security clearances, several US officials
said on Friday.
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It is the second such breach of federal
records revealed in the last week.
The forms authorities believed to have
been accessed require applicants to fill
out deeply personal information about
mental illness, drug and alcohol use,
past arrests and bankruptcies.
They also require the listing of contacts
and relatives, potentially exposing any
foreign relatives of US intelligence
employees to coercion. Both the
applicant’s national identification
number and that of his or her
cohabitant is required.
The officials spoke on condition of
anonymity because the security
clearance material is classified.
In a statement, the White House said
that on June 8, investigators concluded
there was “a high degree of confidence
that … systems containing information
related to the background
investigations of current, former and
prospective federal government
employees, and those for whom a
federal background investigation was
conducted, may have been
exfiltrated.”
“This tells the Chinese the identities of
almost everybody who has got a United
States security clearance,” said Joel
Brenner, a former top US
counterintelligence official. “That
makes it very hard for any of those
people to function as an intelligence
officer. The database also tells the
Chinese an enormous amount of
information about almost everyone with
a security clearance. That’s a gold
mine. It helps you approach and
recruit spies.”
The Office of Personnel Management
(OPM), a central personnel database,
which was the target of the hack, has
not officially notified military or
intelligence personnel whose security
clearance data was breached, but news
of the second hack was starting to
circulate in both the Pentagon and the
CIA.
The officials said they believe the hack
into the security clearance database
was separate from the breach of
federal personnel data announced last
week – a breach that is itself appearing
far worse than first believed. It could
not be learned whether the security
database breach happened when an
OPM contractor was hacked in 2013, an
attack that was discovered last year.
Members of Congress received classified
briefings about that breach in
September, but there was no mention of
security clearance information being
exposed.
The OPM had no immediate comment
Friday.
Nearly all of the millions of security
clearance holders, including CIA,
National Security Agency and military
special operations personnel, are
potentially exposed in the security
clearance breach, the officials said.
More than 2.9 million people had been
investigated for a security clearance as
of October 2014, according to
government records.

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so the Chinese are this wise?...immediately I saw this topic I smiled and said "Russians"...this shows that no man can be a God!!