Stepping Up Our Game

By General Michael Hayden

General Michael V. Hayden is a retired four-star General in the United States Air Force; he served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006-2009 and as Director of the National Security Agency from 1999-2005.

Jimmie Breslin borrowed a line from manager Casey Stengel to title his chronicle of the worst team in baseball history, the 1962 Mets. Stengel plaintively asked, “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?”  Given recent events, Americans could be asking the same question about their government’s cyber performance.

In June, the Office of Personnel Management announced that someone had grabbed super user status on OPM computers, taking the records of more than four million current, former and retired government employees and, then, within a week OPM added that an attacker had been in the database of the government’s far more sensitive security clearance system for almost a year.  Recent estimates put the number of people affected at 18 million.

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Categorized as:Cyber Tech/Cyber

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