The Department of Agriculture is finally cooperating in a federal investigation into a hack that may have compromised the personal data of thousands of D.C.-area employees and contractors — but it may be too little, too late, an FBI source said.
The Agriculture Department announced in June that someone had hacked into its Web site and accessed data on 26,000 workers and contractors. A whistleblower later told the FBI that he was worried that department officials were trying to undermine the investigation to spare themselves public embarrassment.
Since word of the whistleblower’s worry leaked, Agriculture executives have been more forthcoming, an FBI source said. But much of the evidence related to the hack appears to have disappeared, and it’s too late to reconstruct it, the source said.
Sources have said the hacker had easy access to the Department’s Web site because it wasn’t being monitored properly, a charge Agriculture officials have denied vociferously. But computer experts say that evidence could have been lost if, upon discovering the hack, technicians shut down the department’s server. That might have protected the system, but it also would have erased evidence in a criminal case.
Julie Ryan, assistant professor at George Washington University, said the government and corporations have spent billions on anti-hacker and anti-virus software, but haven’t made their computer technicians understand that they have to think like criminal investigators when they discover a hack.
