One of the most significant cyber-attack was of June 2015, when the Office of Personnel Management,

the human resources department of the United States was breached. The department “oversees the legal

minutiae of how federal employees are hired and promoted and manages benefits and pensions for

millions of current and retired civil servants” (Koerner, B., 2016). It was the one of the largest data

breaches of government data in history. It totaled to approximately 21.5 million number of stolen records.

It was one of the biggest cyber physical attacks due to the damage it affected to many personnel. Their

personal data was stolen, Social Security numbers, job assignments, performance ratings, and training

information even some with criminal records. I think that the OPM breach opened the eyes of the federal

government to and a wake-up call to make initiatives to strengthen the federal’s cyber security.

It happened on June 2015, when a security engineer named Brendan Saulsbury discovered a malware that

was not registered to the departments’ software. They thought they had only discovered a normal phishing

strategy used commonly by hackers, which was normal to them because they receive that kind of threat

10 million times per month. Later they had discovered that the malware was there for almost a year and

that the attack came from a shadowy hacker group who have orchestrated the most devastating cyber-

attacks like infiltration of health insurer Anthem. It was not just some hackers that steals data such as

Social Security numbers to the black market, but it was more likely a state-sponsored attack. According to

the Wall Street Journal, U.S. government officials suspect that Chinese hackers perpetrated the breach

(Viswanatha, A., 2017).

It was one of the most destructive cyber attacks in the American government history. It was truly a wake-

up call for the federal government to take cyber-attacks more seriously and make initiative to strengthen

their defenses against cyber-attack from terrorist groups such as ISIS and enemy states such as Russia.

Jerron Laurente

References:
Koerner, B., Inside the Cyberattack That Shocked the US Government, 2016, Retrieved from:

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/inside-cyberattack-shocked-us-government/

DeCapua, T, The Reality of the Office of Personnel Management Breach and How to Mitigate Risk, n.d.,

Retrieved from: https://techbeacon.com/security/reality-office-personnel-management-breach-how-

mitigate-risk

Viswanatha, A. and Mcmillan, R., Chinese National Charged With Providing Hackers With Malware

Linked to OPM Breach, 2017, Retrieved from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-national-charged-

with-providing-hackers-with-malware-linked-to-opm-breach-1503626027