Report: Hack of government employee records discovered by product demo
Found on Ars Technica on Friday, 12 June 2015
As officials of the Obama administration announced that millions of sensitive records associated with current and past federal employees and contractors had been exposed by a long-running infiltration of the networks and systems of the Office of Personnel Management on June 4, they claimed the breach had been found during a government effort to correct problems with OPM's security.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, the breach was indeed discovered in April. But according to sources who spoke to the WSJ's Damian Paletta and Siobhan Hughes, it was in fact discovered during a sales demonstration of a network forensics software package.
Of course officials need to say that they discovered this long-running attack because they would look pretty clueless when they admit that a simple test scan of a security software found it.