The defenders of the United States have failed to defend their own computers from hackers. The career and personal information of about 33,000 United States Air Force employees at the Randolph Air Force Base in Texas has been hacked into.
The employees were informed about the incident a couple of months after Air Force officials found that a user’s account was swallowing huge bandwidth in June. Further investigations revealed that the online assignment management system (AMS) was being hacked by an outsider through a legitimate user’s account. “We determined that there was one individual who was reviewing a lot of these records ... it was very uncharacteristic,” said Major General Anthony Przybyslawski.
According to the center’s assignments director Colonel Lee Hall, the system hacked into stored information like Social Security numbers and birth dates as also career and assignment preferences of individual employees. Even though the system mentioned academic records, marital status and number of children of the employee, it did not store personal details like residential phone numbers, addresses, family info and financial records. Those whose details have been affected constitute roughly half the officer’s force.
In a letter to the employees, Przybyslawski said that the online AMS was closed down after the hacking came to light but due to preliminary investigations, the development was kept under wraps until now. “I also want to assure you that immediately upon discovery of the unauthorized access, we removed the AMS from service so that a complete security review could be done. A criminal investigation also began immediately; we delayed sending you this notice for a short time to give our law enforcement officials the best opportunity in the early critical time period to catch the perpetrator,” he said in his letter.
All the employees whose records have been compromised were told to keep an eye on their credit reports for fear of identity theft. “Identity theft and other fraudulent uses of our resources steal from our operational budgets,” Przybyslawski added.
The help of military and civilian law enforcement authorities has also been sought to investigate into the incident. “For the Air Force's part, we are conducting a wall-to-wall review of our personnel-related data systems to maximize the security of the systems,” Przybyslawski said.
The system is online again but its security has been tightened. “We notified airmen as quickly as we could while still following criminal investigation procedures. We've taken steps to increase our system security. We're working with all Air Force agencies to identify vulnerabilities,” the letter added.
