Hackers Stole Millions of US Military Personnel Records During Months-Long Data Breach (techcrunch.com) 70
A months-long breach of the Defense Manpower Data Center exposed personal information belonging to roughly 2.8 million living current and former U.S. military personnel and staff, plus records for nearly 300,000 deceased people. Attackers reportedly exploited a file-sharing vulnerability between October 2025 and July 2026, accessing unencrypted records that included Social Security numbers, dates of birth, demographic information, and military service details. TechCrunch reports: The DMDC may not be widely known to the general public, but serves as one of the Department of Defense's records-keeping units. The DMDC maintains over 60 million records for U.S. military and civilian staff and their family members to help determine benefits and entitlements, such as healthcare and retirement. The unit also provides a critical service as the military's "leading identity management provider," which links active service members, employees, and contractors to credentials, such as smart cards and passwords. These are used to access Pentagon computer systems, buildings, and bases.
"We make sure that the right people get access and the wrong people don't: security of identity information is paramount," the DMDC's website reads. The Department of Defense, which oversees the DMDC, said it does not have any indication that the information was misused, but did not say how it reached that conclusion. TechCrunch contacted a Pentagon spokesperson to ask if officials had any communications from the hackers, whose identities are not known, but we did not hear back.
"We make sure that the right people get access and the wrong people don't: security of identity information is paramount," the DMDC's website reads. The Department of Defense, which oversees the DMDC, said it does not have any indication that the information was misused, but did not say how it reached that conclusion. TechCrunch contacted a Pentagon spokesperson to ask if officials had any communications from the hackers, whose identities are not known, but we did not hear back.
Heh (Score:2)
"The Department of Defense, which oversees the DMDC, said it does not have any indication that the information was misused, but did not say how it reached that conclusion."
Hear no evil...
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Sometimes the worst port of incident response is the responders not knowing when to just STFU.
Honestly what a statement to make. Nobody breaks into a system exfils and bunch of records without authorization without some intention to miss use the information. I guess there is a edge case where it is 'just a stunt' or part of some pentest/proof of concept exercise, in the latter case though it isn't an incident and is authorized just not thru ordinary procedure.
All saying you have no indication the informati
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Just be evil . . .
Sometimes... (Score:2)
...it seems like the current US administration is acting as an agent for the country's enemies
No surprises (Score:2)
DMDC is run by morons who are neither web developers nor security experts. It's more or less a bunch of useless MBA-type retards.
Re:No surprises (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No surprises (Score:4, Informative)
And Musk stole every piece of information he could get his hands on anyway.
The right people get access and the wrong people don't? Sure, that must be why family members who can't qualify for clearances get them anyway.
Re:No surprises (Score:4, Insightful)
We'd have to claw back all the data that got funneled to Peter Thiel's organization, DOGE siphoned off a lot and sent it to them.
There's no regaining the trust of America's former allies. They now know that the American political system is as much to blame as la Presidenta for enabling an idiot like him to get the top spot. They cannot trust that Americans won't be similarly stupid in the future and decide, based on their myopic concerns, to burn down institutions that actually work; they are too stupid to understand how they work.
The Ministry of Christian War Crimes will now have to be de-wormed from infestation caused by the current asshole. He even is setting up a Christian ministry inside the organization devoted to Christian hate. He is pop. the upper ranks with Nazis, and making the organization anathema to everything America stood for before la Presidenta took over. And all this before we lose another war. And that war won't be over Taiwan. el Bunko will do a deal with Emperor Xi: they get Taiwan and we get to buy Taiwanese chips at inflated prices and subject to cut off whenever Emperor Xi has a bad day.
We'll have to dismantle the Ministry of Propaganda that la Presidenta is setting up in the gov. His silly chatbot is only the beginning. Project 2025 has big plans for the Ministry. If they are able and with the proper funding of genetic research, they'll recreate Josef Goebbels to run it again.
There's no replacing the trust the judicial system had in the justice dept when that department can be used as la Presidenta's personal vendetta sycophants. And that's not even counting all the la Presidenta bootlickers he and the R's in Congress have inserted into the judiciary. The justice dept has misled grand juries. And when they have a case in front of a judge that is not one of their toadies, e.g. Ailieen Cannon, Emil Bove, etc., they find a justice dept. lawyer who knows nothing about the case and hence cannot answer any of the judge's questions.
There's no replacing the lack of honor in Federal Law Enforcement short of disbanding ICE, the FBI, and a few others, and rebuilding from scratch. Those organizations have been corrupted, just like everything else el Bunko touches.
We might have a shot of restoring the Treasury and the IRS, but we'd have to go through those organizations with a scalpel and excise the filth with which la Presidenta and Project 2025 have infected those organizations.
And there is no non-generational change method to put the racist genie back into the bottle that la Presidenta has let out. He didn't cause the racism, but he's made it safe to be racist in the America, a nation built by immigrants, slavery, stealing Indian land, lack of human rights, etc.
Re:No surprises (Score:4, Interesting)
We'd have to claw back all the data that got funneled to Peter Thiel's organization, DOGE siphoned off a lot and sent it to them.
There's no regaining the trust of America's former allies. They now know that the American political system is as much to blame as la Presidenta for enabling an idiot like him to get the top spot. They cannot trust that Americans won't be similarly stupid in the future and decide, based on their myopic concerns, to burn down institutions that actually work; they are too stupid to understand how they work.
The Ministry of Christian War Crimes will now have to be de-wormed from infestation caused by the current asshole. He even is setting up a Christian ministry inside the organization devoted to Christian hate. He is pop. the upper ranks with Nazis, and making the organization anathema to everything America stood for before la Presidenta took over. And all this before we lose another war. And that war won't be over Taiwan. el Bunko will do a deal with Emperor Xi: they get Taiwan and we get to buy Taiwanese chips at inflated prices and subject to cut off whenever Emperor Xi has a bad day.
We'll have to dismantle the Ministry of Propaganda that la Presidenta is setting up in the gov. His silly chatbot is only the beginning. Project 2025 has big plans for the Ministry. If they are able and with the proper funding of genetic research, they'll recreate Josef Goebbels to run it again.
There's no replacing the trust the judicial system had in the justice dept when that department can be used as la Presidenta's personal vendetta sycophants. And that's not even counting all the la Presidenta bootlickers he and the R's in Congress have inserted into the judiciary. The justice dept has misled grand juries. And when they have a case in front of a judge that is not one of their toadies, e.g. Ailieen Cannon, Emil Bove, etc., they find a justice dept. lawyer who knows nothing about the case and hence cannot answer any of the judge's questions.
There's no replacing the lack of honor in Federal Law Enforcement short of disbanding ICE, the FBI, and a few others, and rebuilding from scratch. Those organizations have been corrupted, just like everything else el Bunko touches.
We might have a shot of restoring the Treasury and the IRS, but we'd have to go through those organizations with a scalpel and excise the filth with which la Presidenta and Project 2025 have infected those organizations.
And there is no non-generational change method to put the racist genie back into the bottle that la Presidenta has let out. He didn't cause the racism, but he's made it safe to be racist in the America, a nation built by immigrants, slavery, stealing Indian land, lack of human rights, etc.
The ultimate goal of the people who saw Trump's rise as a weaponized version of something they'd been trying to achieve for decades is to cause so much disruption that even if "the right people" get into power after him, there's so much shit gobbing up the works that they'll have to concentrate on fixing the most egregious rather than moving the country and the world forward towards actual progress.
It's not like there weren't warnings hanging everywhere during the start of this absolute shitshow. Even during his 2016 run, Trump essentially ran on chaos and bluster, with zero actual tactical plans good or bad. People with brains and money saw it and learned how to play the man like a fiddle by the time 2024 rolled around. So, sure, he's a chaotic force of weirdness at best, but somebody stroking his ego and throwing money his direction can get him to do pretty much anything, and have him go full Goerge Costanza "such a cool guy" gushing over them after. It's not limitless, and it's tough for other egos to keep the momentum going, as we saw when Musk's ego clashed with Trump's ego, but he can be manipulated with the right combination of funding / gifts / grifts and ego stroking.
Even if we have a clean-sweep of anti-Trumpers / anti-GOPers over the next several elections, it's going to take DECADES to unwind all the stupidity they've created even within the United States. As for the world stage, well, I wasn't the only person to say before the election that Trump makes our whole country look worse to the entire rest of the world. His number one trait as President the first time around was making chaotic and stupid moves against allies and cozying up to despots, making our country seem impossible to trust to those who previously considered us friends. And we're going to have to live with that image for a LOT longer than a couple election cycles. Because if we did it twice? We can do it again in a heartbeat. And the world knows now that 2016 wasn't a fluke. It was just the first full flaring of symptoms that had long been rotting us from within, finally reaching the surface. And now we've shown the world that when push comes to shove, we'll lean into those symptoms. Even if we take the entire rest of the world with us.
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Throwing money in trump's direction, you say?
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There's no regaining the trust of America's former allies.
Ummm, there is a much more fundamental problem than the trust of allies: There's no regaining the trust of America's citizens. The government has left its own citizens behind!
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Khrushchev would love that our government is full of people who disagree with the principle of Chesterton's Fence. It's appalling that "conservatives" have become so far to the left of "The Left."
Vote conservative: vote Democrat.
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It's really difficult to clean up the entire federal government once it gets so badly infected. A lot of the infection was already there, it's just that now it's running the place. You can find all of the incompetent Trump hires and give them the boot, but replacing them with competent people is going to take a lot of time. It's not like there are many people clawing at the windows to get a job where you have to be grilled regularly by the least qualified/fit for office politicians. It takes a long time to
Re: No surprises (Score:2)
Should have hanged all of the slavers.
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"A months-long breach" (Score:5, Insightful)
MONTHS-LONG? Heads should roll and everyone left with any data-security-responsibility will need to be retrained.
Hours or even days-long I can see. But months? Really?
Re:"A months-long breach" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:"A months-long breach" (Score:4, Insightful)
LOL, when you're shooting for a "Funny" mod, but instead you get Insightful, Informative, and Troll!
Am always amazed how often something objectively true gets marked "Troll" or Flamebait around here. Guess some people have very thin skins, especially with regard to facts.
Re: "A months-long breach" (Score:2)
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It is clear that the right wing wants to squelch the truth.
Remember, Trump in Nevada: 'I Love the Poorly Educated' [youtube.com].
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To be fair, Petey Pete was far too busy making sure all the soldiers had High T ...
And applying hair gel ...
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Don't forget updating all the maps for everything named to "America".
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They probably need another trillion dollars and this time they'll do it right!
No accountability, no consequences for failure.
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Paid in gold bars to one guy.
Re:"A months-long breach" (Score:4, Informative)
MONTHS-LONG? Heads should roll and everyone left with any data-security-responsibility will need to be retrained.
Hours or even days-long I can see. But months? Really?
The DOGE team farmed all our data, including Social Security info, for at least that long ... walked some of it out on a thumb drive.
Google: DOGE (exported|stole) data [google.com]
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Be happy they are doing anything at all. They just don't care. There will be no penalties, no admonishments, no head rolling. If there is any action to be taken, it will happen when it happens. The people who are affected just do not matter at all, so nobody cares about this breach despite being the third major breach in my lifetime concerning my service.
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First thing that comes to mind is one of the things my customers get dinged on all the time. Log reviews. Anyone meeting any kind of compliance says they do it. Nobody is paying for it to be done. There's no extra man hours in their IT budget for someone to review logs. I've never once gotten the okay to review logs for anything we weren't actively looking for/repairing.
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Log reviews are the kind of thing that an automated tool would be good at pointing out things that "don't look normal" for further human review.
Unfortunately, a well-skilled adversary will know to only do things that look "normal enough" to get flagged as "normal." Doing so will fool even a skilled human reviewer if they aren't specifically looking for the adversary's specific technique.
Re: It's got to be Trump's fault - somehow... (Score:5, Insightful)
No. If the system is designed so that a low level guy can fuck it up, it is already fucked.
Re: It's got to be Trump's fault - somehow... (Score:5, Informative)
The person at the top ultimately has to take responsibility for process faults and staff incompetence of the agencies he oversees.
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The person at the top ultimately has to take responsibility for process faults and staff incompetence of the agencies he oversees.
Should. The person at the top SHOULD take responsibility. That's a bet I'm not taking, doubly so for the current admin.
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I'm not arguing that there is an immutable physical constant of the universe, but that culturally and philosophically our society normally expect the responsibility to be attached to the role of leadership. Even though as a cynic I admit that is not how things always work out in the Real World. But if the People that elected him don't care then I guess he doesn't have to be held responsible.
Re: It's got to be Trump's fault - somehow... (Score:2)
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Back when Harry S. Truman was POTUS he had a sign on his desk that said "The buck stops here".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The Orange God Emperor should have a sign that says "The bucks stop here". That mother effer would sell his own children if it meant he'd get a dime.
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The person at the top ultimately has to take responsibility for process faults and staff incompetence of the agencies he oversees.
LOL, bro. Since Reagan sacrificed Oliver North, I have not seen an example of the top taking responsibility for ANYTHING. Oliver North was the blindfold being lifted from my eyes about being on top and responsibility.
Re: (Score:3)
Really? (Score:2, Flamebait)
'Trump choose the idiots that dropped the ball.'
The Defense Manpower Data Center is an element of the US military. So the question is whether the leadership is political or civil service, and, more significantly, why should the leadership be responsible for a security flaw by the staff. Is it really Trump's fault if a programmer doesn't block this?
https://xkcd.com/327/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
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Whoda thunk that picking "leaders" for their loyalty to the Orange God Emperor instead of competence at the job would have consequences?
Typical GOP: scream loudly about how bad government is while doing everything in their power to make it that way and blaming Democrats for why it's bad. It's baked into the One Big Beautiful (For Billionaires) Bill where all the nasty cuts to programs that help the non-wealthy take place after the midterms, where it is likely that the Democrats will win big. They'll take c
Re: (Score:2)
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Re: (Score:2)
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You are commenting on this as if the leadership we're talking about is acting competently and in good faith: that they're there to run a department to the best of their abilities.
That's not what they're there to do. And at that point problems become systematic, it doesn't matter who made this screw up when the entire department is being screwed.
Re:It's got to be Trump's fault - somehow... (Score:5, Informative)
Another problem is people who will pretend that since we cannot prove something is directly Trump's fault, we must absolve him of all responsibility.
Trump put Hegseth in charge, and he has spent his time insisting that the only thing that matters is blowing shit up. He has downplayed the need for logistics (see: Abraham Lincoln, base in Bahrain), protecting civilians (see: Minab), and basic competence.
Instead he has valued loyalty to Trump, obeying illegal orders (see: carribean boat strikes), checking testosterone levels ?!?!, and religious indoctrination [washingtonexaminer.com].
So the question should be: did the low-level programmers have the support they needed, or were they told to make do with limited staff and resources?
Given that this administration doge-d CISA, the civilian agency that provided computer security support to the government, it seems very likely they did the same thing to the DoD.
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Another problem is people who will pretend that since we cannot prove something is directly Trump's fault, we must absolve him of all responsibility.
The bigger problem is that even when something is clearly/directly Trump's fault, some people, including Trump himself, absolve him of all responsibility.
Hell, the FDA Nominee Dr. Heidi Overton wouldn't even say in her confirmation hearing, under oath, that Trump could ever be wrong about something. Straight-up cult stuff... Google: nominee can't say trump wrong [google.com]
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Mod parent funny-not-really-funny.
But the SCOTUS disagreed with you by creating absolute presidential immunity out of nothing.
I know it's silly to contemplate solutions in the context of Slashdot, whatever it has devolved into, but I keep thinking about that new recusal thing: "A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves." I think that could create the incentive to go upstream in fixing the problem, whereas every other solution proposal I've seen simply accepts the und
Re: (Score:2)
But the SCOTUS disagreed with you by creating absolute presidential immunity out of nothing.
Well... out of their asses. So much for being "originalists" and/or "textualists" - again.
Re: It's got to be Trump's fault - somehow... (Score:2)
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Your definition of Commander In Chief must be different than mine.
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So let me get this straight (Score:4, Insightful)
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Trump did make sure Putin got the information, so what's the problem?
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We have the best people (Score:2)
nft
the right people... (Score:2)
Apparently not.
Re: (Score:1)
"We make sure that the right people get access and the wrong people don't: security of identity information is paramount."
Apparently not.
and also a pair of these shoes.......
Testosterone will fix this. (Score:2)
What do you suppose ... (Score:2)
By the way: Nice Lamborghini, PFC Pyle.
And yet ... (Score:2)
Hackers Stole Millions of US Military Personnel Records During Months-Long Data Breach
Hegseth says national security, military cyber forces will guard US election systems during midterms [apnews.com] - and I don't think he was trying to be ironic. :-)
War (Score:2)
No electronic records are "safe", unless (Score:2)
No electronic records are "safe", unless air-gapped.
It's not practical to have widely used systems and completely effective security. Humans and computers are inherently fallible.
Re: No electronic records are "safe", unless (Score:2)
Is that all? (Score:2)
"The DMDC maintains over 60 million records..."
That sounds like a small-to-medium sized database. Do they need an entire department to maintain it?
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