The headaches are not yet over from that massive cyber attack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Washington is now worried that China can use the stolen information to identify the American spies that have been working there secretly throughout the past decade – or longer.
American officials maintain that the CIA and other intelligence agency records were kept separate, and thus were protected from the breach. Nevertheless, through a process of elimination and combining other data, they said Friday hackers can use “big data analytics” to track the identities, according to a report Saturday in The New York Times.
Although the Obama administrative has continued to be reluctant to name the Chinese government as being responsible for the hack, sources who spoke with the newspaper had no such problems.
Millions of records were stolen in the cyber heist over an 18-month period, and may were records of those who had Top Secret clearances. It’s not yet clear what the Chinese would – or could – do with all that data.