I'm not a fan of the Times so take that into consideration, but this strikes me as an attempt to play up the cyberwar angle and whitewash the astonishing incomp

I'm not a fan of the Times so take that into consideration, but this strikes me as an attempt to play up the cyberwar angle and whitewash the astonishing incompetence at the OPM. Namely, Ars has a source saying that sysadmin roles were outsourced (!) to at least one person in Argentina and one other person in China: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/encryption-would-not-have-helped-at-opm-says-dhs-official/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/encryption-would-not... > A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is 'so what's new?'" This is speculation, but I'm going to guess that the sysadmin in China either was an intelligence agent from the beginning, or was coerced into handing over root access to the Chinese military. Not very sophisticated at all, as is the case for a depressing number of high-profile hacks.