WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hackers who stole security clearance data on millions of Defense Department and other U.S. government employees got away with about 5.6 million fingerprint records, some 4.5 million more than initially reported, the government said on Wednesday.
The abrupt shutdown of the nation’s beleaguered security clearance system will further hamper a program that has been beset by all sorts of problems over the past few years, creating a significant backlog and potentially even disrupting key government operations, industry officials say.
After finding that federal employees' Social Security numbers were stolen, the US government discovers another breach, which exposed data on intelligence agents and others.
Federal investigators are trying to determine whether the massive hack into federal systems announced this past week impacted far more than the estimated 4 million current and former government employees already acknowledged by the Obama administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.