Federal Cybersecurity: America's Data at Risk - Report on Increase in Cybersecurity Incidents, Reliance on Legacy Information Technology, Limited Agency Situational Awareness and Network Visibility

This Congressional report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction.

No agency is immune to attack and the list of federal agencies compromised by hackers continues to grow. In the past five years, agencies reporting data breaches include the United States Postal Service, the Internal Revenue Service, and even the White House. One of the largest breaches of government information occurred in 2015 when a hacker ex-filtrated over 22 million security clearance files from the Office of Personnel Management ("OPM"). Those files contained extensive personal and potentially comprising information. We may never know the full impact on our national security of the OPM breach.

The number of data breaches agencies have reported in recent years is not surprising given the current cybersecurity posture of the federal government. A recent report by the Office of Management and Budget ("OMB") made clear that agencies "do not understand and do not have the resources to combat the current threat environment." This is especially concerning given the information agencies must collect and hold. This report documents the extent to which the federal government is the target of cybersecurity attacks, how key federal agencies have failed to address vulnerabilities in their IT infrastructure, and how these failures have left America's sensitive personal information unsafe and vulnerable to theft.

This compilation includes a reproduction of the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.