Weekly Infosec News Brief 1-7 June

OPM Suffers Massive Breach; the Agency Has a History of Information Security Mis-Management

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which is essentially the human resources agency for the entire federal government, suffered a massive breach this year that was disclosed late last week. The breach of over 4 million current and former government employees' information dominated the headlines last week. The e-QIP system, which collects and stores the personal data of security clearance applicants, was one of the affected systems. OPM's Inspector General released a report in November of last year citing information security as a "significant deficiency" at the agency. Failure to maintain a proper inventory of systems was one factor cited. Do YOU know what's on your network?
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/why-the-biggest-government-hack-ever-got-past-opm-dhs-and-nsa/


OPM Breach is Just One of Nine Major Recent Breaches Focused on Collecting PII

A very large breach at the Office of Personnel Management was announced last week, and that However, US CERT issued a report in May about nine other large breaches in the past year that were focused on stealing large quantities of personal information on employees. The purpose appears to be to leverage this data at a later time for future cyber attacks.

These breaches demonstrate the value that attackers place on employees' personal and payroll information. Where is your organization's human resources information stored? How is it protected?
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=520&sid=3871378&pid=0&page=1


Trade Association Membership Data Lost Via Cyber Fraud

The Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment, a UK-based trade association for the investment industry, suffered a breach last week which resulted in the release of personal contact information for their entire membership. This breach appears to have been the result of simple fraud, or "social engineering," where an individual contacted an Institute employee and convinced that person to provide the list. This loss points out that in an age of increasingly sophisticated technical attacks, simple fraud still has a great potential to compromise data.
http://www.cisi.org/bookmark/genericform.aspx?form=29848780&URL=databreachfaq

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