I Finally Got My Letter

For John, BLUF:  A data breach can happen anywhere.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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I finally got my letter from Ms Beth Cobert, Acting Director, Office of Personnel Management (OPM).♠  It was undated.

I quickly called my two sons, making it my first three way conversation on my new iPhone.  I thought I was somebody.  One son said "I got mine some time ago" and the other said that his was probably in mail he hadn't yet opened, but did mention his 25 years in the "Community".

OK, I said to myself, I will call my two brothers.  The Youngest wasn't home, but my Middle Brother was and he said "Are you just getting yours?"  He also enlightened me as to the slow pace at which OPM operates.  He said they claim they are seriously understaffed.  And, the first thing they do is ask you for your personal data—SSAN, Driver License Number and things of that ilk.  Great, they are writing to tell me that my personal data has been taken by "a malicious cyber intrusion" (read Chinese hackers), and now they want to double my exposure.

Considering there were some 18 million letters to send out, someone had to be at the end of the line.  Why not me.  As to it being a letter, it was one of those mailers where one side of the paper was the "letter" and the other side the addressing and I had to pull off the ends to open it up.

But, they did offer me "credit monitoring, identity monitoring, identity theft insurance and identity restoration services for the next three years".  Three years.  That doesn't seem very long.

I did, however, get my own PIN Number (isn't that like saying Pizza Pie?), five groups, with five digits each.

The joys of not having a good cyber-security policy in the Federal Government.  At least I wasn't using my personal computer for Government business.  Well, except for the License Commission, but the City didn't offer up a computer and I doubt that any of the Licensees are into cyber-espionage.  And, thanks to the Open Meeting Law it is all out there somewhere anyway.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  This letter was about the recent OPM Data Breach.