US Government Hack Leads To Millions Of Stolen Fingerprints
It’s not every day that a person has to concern himself with his fingerprints. They may be part of some files or statistics, but in normal life they’re a detail that’s easy enough to overlook. But for some people, that detail is more precious than anyone could possibly imagine — and now it’s in the hands of people who might want it dearly.
White House officials recently went on record and admitted that a whopping 5.6 million fingerprint records were stolen from the Office of Personnel Management. As a result, information about millions of governmental staff members is in the hands of whoever hacked their way into the files — and the current fear is that the information belongs to Chinese malcontents. In the worst-case scenario, it could mean that US employees — agents or otherwise — are at risk of blackmail, identity theft, or even assassination.
Luckily, there’s no guarantee of that happening just yet. OPM officials have said that there isn’t much that can be done with fingerprints right now, so plenty of information is safe. Even so, it’s not unreasonable to think that if technology keeps developing, then hackers will exploit every last print they have. As it stands, it looks as if some new cyber-security measures need to come out sooner rather than later.
