August 19, 2015 | Quote

Manipulation of Feds’ Personal Data is a Major Danger in OPM Cyber Heist

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data breach shows us how espionage is done in the digital world.

It’s not only about the theft of information, it’s also about the potential manipulation of personal data. Records can be changed to make a federal employee appear less trustworthy or possibly destroyed to make a person disappear, at least in the computer files.

Meanwhile, about 22 million federal workers, contractors, job applicants and their families, whose information was stolen, are still waiting for some relief, if only in the form of the services the government promised after the two breaches were announced in June. 

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Jani Antikainen and Pasi Eronen, in an article on the Overt Action Web site, said that could result in the government not trusting its own personnel data, and therefore not its people.

Nothing is worse than the loss of trust.

“Suddenly, cleared personnel would have different relatives and some suspicious names in their ‘who do you know’ networks,” they wrote. “These unauthorized changes would thus deliver a massive blow to the trustworthiness of all data in the system….maliciously manipulating official forms and records on a large scale would turn them toxic and into a source of great mistrust.”

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Read the full article here