U.S. Department of Human Resources transitions to work with handwritten statements for security reasons

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    From the E-QIP website, the

    US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) temporarily closed the website for receiving applications from government officials and  announced the transition to paperwork . The reason was the global restructuring of the entire electronic system for receiving E-QIP calls, caused by a hacker attack that was uncovered in April 2015, as a result of which personal information about millions of government employees fell into the hands of third parties.

    For the first time, a security breach of the E-QIP system was discovered in April 2015, and it was announced only in June. At the same time, data leakage began to occur back in March 2014, and according to some reports - perhaps earlier. At first it was announced that 4 million civil servants were victims of the hack. Then the head of the FBI, James Komi, said on June 24 that, in total, records related to 18 million civil servants could leak from the system . After that, new details were revealed, as a result of which the total number of victims can reach 32 million .

    It was one of the largest data leaks in US history. It is not yet known exactly which employees were compromised - most employees have no idea whether their data is safe or not.

    Social security numbers, names, dates and places of birth, and residential addresses leaked in an unknown direction. There is reason to suspect a leak and additional information related to internal investigations into employee trustworthiness (bad habits, sexual addictions , etc.). As one of the victims of the leak described the situation: "Agency representatives interview your neighbors to find out what they know about you, so that you can use this information against you." In addition, there was a leak of data related to the categories of access to classified information.

    The US government hastened to blame the leak of Russian and Chinese hackers, decided to transfer all government service sites to HTTPSuntil the end of next year, and seriously took care of the security of personal data of civil servants. For this , the E-QIP workflow system was closed for updating for a period of four to six weeks.

    But, since it is somehow necessary to work at this time, all statements that usually passed through this system during this period will be accepted in handwritten form - that is, on paper. This, in particular, documents related to internal investigations, applications for employment, etc. The application for employment alone contains approximately 120 printed pages . At least, such information cannot be stolen via the Internet.

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