Federal Cybersecurity One Year After the OPM Breach

One year ago, on July 10, 2015, Katherine Archuleta resigned her position as Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in the face of intense criticism following the announcement that OPM had been the victim of the worst breach of a government network in U.S. history. The actual breach itself had occurred much earlier, in March 2014, but OPM’s announcement about the theft of millions of people’s personal information came during a streak of similar breaches. In the wake of intrusions at Anthem, Sony, and Target, cybersecurity was already on everyone’s mind, a fact which only served to increase the impact of OPM’s announcement. Since then, the shadow of the OPM breach has loomed large over every action the U.S. government has taken to try and improve its resilience in the cyber-domain. But in the year since Archuleta resigned, how much has changed?

A number of factors contributed to the OPM’s vulnerability to enemy hackers, and these factors were by no means limited to just OPM. Archuleta blamed the breach on OPM’s legacy systems, old pieces of hardware and software that were still in use despite being profoundly outdated. This argument is not without merit, and in the time since has helped spur a much-needed conversation about the federal acquisitions process.

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