7 “Decades in the Making”: The Office of Personnel Management Breach and Political Espionage

On May 27, 2014, the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) shut down almost all of its computer systems. During the outage, the agency created brand new user accounts for many of its employees, reset Internet routers, removed software processes running on its machines, and instituted a requirement that administrators use a physical key card in addition to a password to authenticate to their computer accounts. Dubbed the “Big Bang” within the agency, the day was intended to serve as a massive reset of OPM's network, aimed at eliminating the presence of intruders who had been accessing the agency's computers since July 2012 and had recently begun delivering keylogging malware to workstations across the agency. But despite the extensive overhaul of OPM servers and accounts, the Big Bang ultimately failed to root out the malware and backdoor access pathways that those intruders had planted in the OPM network. In the months that followed the system reset, OPM would experience its most extensive and damaging security intrusions yet, culminating in the theft of personal information belonging to more than 20 million current and former federal employees.