Comments
The US defence agency, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) responsible for securing White House communications reported a data breach between May to July 2019, Reuters reported on Friday.
Twitter user Andy Piazza (@klrgrz) first shared a letter received by him from DISA notifying him of the breach and the potential misuse of his personal data, including a social security number.
“Awesome. Got another #PII #breach letter from DoD. Is this like pokemon where I want to catch them all?” Piazza captioned a picture of the letter in his tweet .
“During the May to July 2019 timeframe, some of you information including your social security number ay have been compromised in a data breach on a system hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency,” said the letter, dated February 11, 2020
The agency is the prime service provider of all direct telecommunications and IT support for President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, their staff, and the US Secret Service, as mentioned on its website.
It also provides direct support to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other senior members of the armed forces, and its field offices support US military commanders abroad.
The DoD agency that employees over 8000 military personnel and civilians also provides direct services to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff apart from senior members of the armed forces, and its field offices support to US military commanders abroad, the report said.
The company did not disclose the scope of the breach. According to online news portal Fifth Domain “approximately 200,000” users might have been affected due to the breach as informed by a Pentagon spokesman.
This is not the first data breach reported by DISA. The company had reported a major data breach in 2018 where personal, and payment card details of more than 30,000 DOD military and civilian personnel had been exposed via a security breach at a third-party contractor, ZDNet had reported.
Data including social security numbers and personal information of individuals could be misused as a result of the 2019 breach according to media reports.
Comments
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.