The credit card data and travel records of roughly 30,000 employees of the U.S. Defense Department have been compromised in a data breach.
The hack was first detected on October 4th, but may have occurred months ago and could have affected more accounts than initially reported. Despite this, the Pentagon has tried to downplay the potentially wider scope of the incident.
“It’s important to understand that this was a breach of a single commercial vendor that provided service to a very small percentage of the total population,” said Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Joseph Buccino.
High-level federal cybersecurity has come under intense scrutiny in recent years. A cyberattack targeting the Office of Personnel Management in 2015 compromised the information of at least 22 million federal employees and contractors, and a more recent assessment from the Government Accountability Office showed that nearly all of the nation’s weapons systems were vulnerable to hacking.
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