White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that the Obama administration was not rushing to conclusions about who was behind the effort to steal information from millions of federal workers, and refused to point the finger at China.
Earnest told reporters there was “no conclusion” yet about who was involved or where they launched what some are calling the biggest data breach in history. The hack happened in December, and was discovered in April by the Office of Personnel Management.
There is “still a lot of work that needs to be done to get to the bottom of this incident,” Earnest said. He was asked several times to confirm if the attack was based in China, as some news outlets have reported, but declined.
At the State Department, spokeswoman Marie Harf had about the same message to deliver.
“I just said very clearly the investigation is ongoing, and I’m not going to proscribe blame for that at this point,” she said. “As we have facts to share about it, we’ll make a decision about what makes sense to share publicly.”
OPM announced the problem late Thursday, but the incident was discovered in April, and Earnest seemed to be hinting that something was afoot in the days and weeks before it was announced. On Thursday afternoon, for example, Earnest warned that the U.S. government was still susceptible to these attacks.
The “director of national intelligence has been clear that the United States is facing a cyberthreat that’s increasing in frequency, scale, sophistication and severity of impact,” he said, just hours before OPM announced the breach.
