Office of Personnel Management

At a high level, Chinese hackers executed a sophisticated attack that gave them “administrator privileges” into the computer networks at the Office of Personnel Management, mimicking the credentials of people who run the agency’s systems

Their ultimate target:
1 million or so federal employees and contractors who have filled out a form known as SF-86, which is stored in a different computer bank and details personal, financial and medical histories for anyone seeking a security clearance.

How they did it:
They began siphoning out a rush of data after constructing what amounted to an electronic pipeline that led back to China

Why was it easy for them:
Much of the personnel data had been stored in the lightly protected systems of the department of the interior, because it had cheap, available space for digital data storage

What’s being done to prevent future incidents:
Administration is urgently working to determine what other agencies are storing similarly sensitive information with weak protections