The personal information of 237,000 current and former federal government employees has been exposed in a data breach at the US Transportation Department (USDOT), sources briefed on the matter said on Friday.
The breach hit systems for processing TRANServe transit
benefits that reimburse government employees for some commuting costs. It was
not clear if any of the personal information had been used for criminal
purposes.
USDOT notified Congress Friday in an email seen by Reuters
that its initial investigation of the data breach has "isolated the breach
to certain systems at the department used for administrative functions, such as
employee transit benefits processing."
USDOT said in a statement to Reuters the breach did not
affect any transportation safety systems. It did not say who might be
responsible for the hack.
The department is investigating the breach and has frozen
access to the transit benefit system until it has been secured and restored, it
said.
The maximum benefit allowance is $280 per month for federal
employee mass transit commuting costs. The breach impacted 114,000 current
employees and 123,000 former employees.
Federal employees and agencies have been target of hackers
in the past.
Two breaches at the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM)
in 2014 and 2015 compromised sensitive data belonging to more than 22 million
people, including 4.2 million current and federal employees along with
fingerprint data of 5.6 million of those individuals.
Suspected Russian hackers who used SolarWinds and Microsoft
software to burrow into US federal agencies breached unclassified Justice
Department networks and read emails at the Treasury, Commerce and Homeland
Security departments. Nine federal agencies were breached, Reuters reported in
2021. © Reuters
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