On June 4, the Office of Personnel Management in the Federal Government announced a major breach of data on 4 million individuals.
Since Berkeley Lab employees are not Federal employees, most LBL employees and affiliates are not included in the scope of the breach. However, OPM also processes security clearances for the Federal Government, which a very small number of Berkeley Lab employees have or have had in the past. In addition, LBL has employees who previously worked as Federal employees. While no specifics have been announced,both individuals with clearances and former federal employees should monitor the news as well as look for emails from OPM’s contractor opmcio@csid.com to learn if they were potentially impacted
Does this impact me?
As employees of the University of California, your information is not shared with the Office of Personnel Management. However, if you are one of the small number of LBL employees with a security clearance, or if you are a former Federal government employee or clearance holder, you may be impacted.
Could this happen here?
Security breaches by sophisticated adversaries can be hard to defend against, but LBL takes numerous steps to protect your personally identifiable information through both business process engineering and technical controls to reduce (but not eliminate) the chance of such a breach. LBL cyber security will take all information available about this breach into account as it refines its protections for the Laboratory.
You can help protect PII by following LBL policy which includes the requirement that no PII reside outside institutional business systems, and that you report non-compliant business processes to security@lbl.gov when you encounter them. Review SEC220 to learn more about how you can help prevent breaches of personally identifiable information: Controlled Information Training (SEC 0220)
Where can I get more information?
OPM Website: http://www.opm.gov/news/latest-news/announcements/
DOE Powerpedia: https://powerpedia.energy.gov/wiki/OPM_Cyber_Incident (note: powerpedia is only available from the wired LBL network)
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