Well Experts are Experts
Credentials and Identities which were breached earlier have surfaced on the darknet and are being traded actively. More than four million government employees personal data were breached. The extent of personal data stolen makes this attack an order of magnitude greater than any we have seen of its kind in the past,” said California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee who was briefed on the attack
the credentials and identities have been discovered online and are being traded actively
The recent OPM breach was identified, noted and the credentials and identities have been discovered online and are being traded actively… When these accounts are posted on the darker side of the net, they are usually ‘live’ and are part of a larger breach,” Roberts added. “They are typically parsed out and sold and distributed to interested parties, something OWL tracks
Whoever now holds OPM’s records possesses something like the Holy Grail from a [counter-intelligence] perspective,” Schindler said. “They can target Americans in their database for recruitment or influence. After all, they know their vices, every last one — the gambling habit, the inability to pay bills on time, the spats with former spouses, the taste for something sexual on the side perhaps with someone of a different gender than your normal partner — since all that is recorded in security clearance paperwork.
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this is not merely that four million people are vulnerable to compromise, through no fault of their own, but that the other side now so dominates the information battlespace that it can halt actions against them,” Schindler said. “If they get word that a American counterintelligence officer, in some agency, is on the trail of one of their agents, they can pull out the stops and create mayhem for him or her: run up debts falsely – they have all the relevant data, perhaps plant dirty money in bank accounts -they have all the financials too, and thereby cause any curious officials to lose their security clearances. Since that is what would happen.
For our Intelligence Community to get hit by this and the Snowden debacle within two years speaks to systemic failure, not ‘oversights’ and ‘mistakes’ any longer,” Schindler said. “We’re not serious about stemming foreign espionage, and now that neglect has caused serious pain that will last decades. Some of the damage may not be repairable, ever.
