US State Department Experiences Employee Data Breach

• The United States State Department had a data breach which has leaked employee data.
• Personal information of employees was exposed.
• Classified emails have not been affected according to the department.

The US State Department had some of its employees' information leaked in a Potential PII(personally identifiable information) data breach recently. The email system breach is said to have affected less than 1% of the employees inboxes. The department sent out an alert on September 7 notifying employees about the breach. The classified email system was not affected according to the officials.

US State employees who had their personal information exposed have been notified personally about the breach, and a resolution is being worked on. It is unknown who is behind the breach and partner agencies are currently conducting a full assessment. Steps have already been taken prior to the public announcement to secure the systems from similar breaches in the future.

Image Courtesy of Politico

Employees who were affected will be offered three years of free credit monitoring as compensation by the US State department according to reports. Last week senators wrote to the department’s secretary after the data breach to inquire why basic cybersecurity protections were not in place.

The senators stated, “We are sure you will agree on the need to protect American diplomacy from cyber attacks, which is why we have such a hard time understanding why the Department of State has not followed the lead of many other agencies and complied with federal law requiring agency use of MF.”

There is no official word on how many users were affected by the data breach. Data breaches are at an all-time high with even recently GovPayNet's 14 million users affected and multiple security vulnerabilities are recorded around the world in the recent past. While taking proper security measures and having secure passwords and two-factor authentication is essential, but when data breaches occur at the server end of services, it becomes unpreventable for the end-user.

What do you think about the US State Department data breach? Also, share the news on social media and catch up with us on Facebook and Twitter.