FAA officials had to admit that hackers breached one of the agency’s servers, stealing 48 files. Two of the files contained information on 45,000 current and former FAA employees, including sensitive information that could potentially make them vulnerable to identity theft.
The security breach, although significant and potentially far reaching, demonstrates the problems of securing federal computer systems and difficulty in evading every potential attack.
Most of the files that the hackers copied contained useless test data, according to FAA officials. It remains unclear if the server also coincidentally contained old sensitive data or if agency employees were using real information in a test environment. The compromised records were from 2006, according to FAA officials.
