Reuters reported that unknown people have hacked the U.S. Transportation Department to access sensitive data of over 237,000 government employees.
While the department is investigating the incident, it claims no transportation safety systems have been affected. While it informed Congress about this breach, it’s unknown whether the data has been abused in the outside yet.
Breaching the US TRANServe
Sensitive data of over 237,000 current and former federal government employees have been breached, Reuters reports citing an email sent by the U.S. Transportation Department (USDOT) to Congress yesterday.
The data breach incident occurred against the TRANServe system of USDOT, which is set up for reimbursing commuting costs for government employees. As it stores the employee data, a breach on this resulted in unknown hackers accessing the PII of 237,000 employees(114,000 current and 123,000 former).
While it’s unclear if any of this data was exploited for criminal purposes, USDOT said their initial investigation has “isolated the breach to certain systems at the department used for administrative functions, such as employee transit benefits processing”.
The department has further stated that no transportation safety system has been impacted by this incident, while not disclosing who’s behind the attack. This isn’t the first US department that has been affected by a data breach. The US Office of Personnel Management(OPM) was hacked twice to leak the sensitive data of more than 22 million people, which included 4.2 million federal employees.
SolarWinds’ attack in 2021 affected nearly a dozen US government agencies, where the hackers exploited a bug in the updating software to access sensitive content.
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