Federal employees this week filed suit over the June 4th federal data breach. The breach is said to the largest in government history, and allegedly the result of Chinese hackers seeking super secret spy information.
The crux of the lawsuit is something all corporations should pay heed to as its the same argument made by plaintiffs in Target and HomeDepot breaches too- how much knowledge did the government have about potential breaches and did the government fail to act? As for the feds, the lawsuit alleges:
- The federal government was on notice because:
- “10 million confirmed intrusion attempts targeting its network in an average month”
- OPM Breach potentially affects 18 million federal applicants
- OIG found that in many areas the OPM’s performance actually got worse in that “a 2014 OIG report, the ‘drastic increase in the number of [software] systems operating without valid authorization is alarming and represents a systemic issue of inadequate planning by the OPM offices to authorize the [software] systems they own.”