Facing Major Data Breach, US Tries to Blame China

Few Details, But Officials Aim to Pin Incident on China

The US Office of Personnel Management today confirmed a major security breach in which some four million federal employees had their personal information taken, in what is believe to be the biggest single breach of government computer networks in history.

The loss of the database is another major blow for the administration’s focus on cybersecurity, and the FBI says they’re still looking into the why and the how of the breach, suggesting that even though they’ve known about the breach since April there is precious little they’ve figured out yet about what happened.

That’s no reason not to recklessly throw around blame, however, and official speculation that China could conceivably be the culprit, based seemingly entirely on the notion that China would like the sort of data that was lost, has fed on itself to the point that top Congressional officials are claiming certitude that China was to blame.

There is no publicly available evidence that China is involved at all, however. Some media outlets are claiming Congressional comments as the source, and some Congressmen are claiming media reports. The fact that the employees are being warned to monitor their credit reports, however, suggests that they have not ruled out the possibility this was private hackers stealing financial information for the sake of identity theft.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.