Six months after the Office of Personnel Management discovered it was breached, the agency has nearly finished notifying the victims.
The agency announced Friday it had “concluded the initial mailing of letters to roughly 93% of individuals whose Social Security number and other personal information was stolen in the cyber incident relating to background investigation records.”
OPM said it was unable to locate the seven percent who have not been notified, or approximately 1.6 million people. “Additional letters will be mailed as individuals contact the verification center or if we can obtain better addresses for letters returned to sender through the postal service,” the agency said in a press release.
Investigators discovered in June that the agency was breached by hackers linked to the Chinese government, placing the initial estimate of those affected at 4.2 million. In July, they announced that an additional repository of security clearance files had been breached, bringing the total to 22.1 million.
In addition to the notification that information was stolen, the letters include information for victims about identity theft and credit monitoring services. Though if the Chinese government is behind the breach, that is unlikely to be helpful. Experts have said they expect the information to be used by the country to exploit American intelligence operatives, not use the information for further theft.
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Nearly all of the victims have been notified over the past month. As of early November, the agency said it had notified only about one-quarter, or about five million.
