(Illustration: Rossaprimavera)

Friday’s cyber-attack affected 114,000 working government employees and 123,000 former employees. The breach hit systems for processing TRANServe transit benefits that reimburse government employees for some commuting costs. It was not clear if any of the personal information had been used for criminal purposes.  

The Department of Transportation notified Congress Friday in an email seen by Reuters that its initial investigation of the data breach has "isolated the breach to certain systems at the department used for administrative functions, such as employee transit benefits processing."

In early April, an estimated 100 classified Pentagon documents were leaked. The documents contain sensitive information on Russia, China, North Korea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and close US allies such as South Korea and Israel. Much of the document deals with the conflict in Ukraine. Experts say this may just be the "tip of the iceberg", the scale of the leak may be much larger than currently recorded.

The repeated leaks of US government data have exposed loopholes in the government's secrecy management, even after agencies overhauled their computer systems in the wake of Edward Snowden in 2013 revealing numerous global surveillance programs, many run by National Security Agency and the WikiLeaks in 2017 releasing documents called “Vault 7” from the super-secret cyber warfare division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The US Department of Defense, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and others overhauled their computer systems to better track access to the sensitive documents. The agencies also improved their ability to detect anomalies in internet traffic from US-based systems, in part to help prevent foreign hackers from moving large amounts of data from US computers.

Cybersecurity has been the US government’s top priority, but with the recent breaches, there is still a long way to go before the US government can prevent further data leaks and cyber-attacks.