OPM chief resigns in wake of massive cyberattack

The embattled head of the office that oversees federal job applicant background checks resigned on Friday, a day after she disclosed than the personal data of more than 21 million Americans was stolen in one of the gravest cyberattacks ever launched against a government computer system.

Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta, who had resisted demands that she quit, personally submitted her resignation to President Barack Obama, who accepted it.

“I conveyed to the president that I believe it is best for me to step aside and allow new leadership to step in, enabling the agency to move beyond the current challenges and allowing the employees at OPM to continue their important work,” Archuleta said in a statement.

The penetration of OPM’s computer system, and a smaller but related hack of a database that was revealed last month, underscored the vulnerabilities of government computers and raised deep fears that the pilfered personal data could be used to blackmail federal workers and contractors with top-secret clearances.

U.S. officials have said that the attacks on the OBM computer system appeared to have originated in China, although the investigation is expected to take some time to complete.

The pilfered data, which was not encrypted, included Social Security numbers, residency, health, employment and education histories and information on family members and friends. In the cases of 19.7 million people who’d applied for security clearances, the data also included highly sensitive material on criminal records, drug use and love lives.

“It will . . . take years before the full security repercussions may be known, and the intelligence community is already taking steps to address any new vulnerabilities posed by the compromise of this data,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest insisted that Archuleta had resigned “of her own volition.” He declined to say whether any of Obama’s personal data was swept up and who the administration suspects was responsible for the breach. He also refused to discuss what the administration believes the hackers intend to do with the stolen information.

“Obviously we want to make sure that those who may be affected by this breach get as much protection and support that we can offer them,” Earnest said.

OPM will provide those affected with credit reporting and identity theft prevention services, and it is setting up a call center from which they could obtain advice, he said.

Earnest could not put a price tag on the cost of the theft protection services and didn’t have a time line for when people might be notified that they were hacked.

But he said the administration is “working very aggressively” to alert those affected. “Promptly notifying those individuals whose data may have been compromised is a top priority of the investigation,” he said.

Archuleta resigned a day after she disclosed the theft of the personal information of 21.5 million federal job applicants and current and past employees whose backgrounds her agency reviewed. At that time, she said she had no intention of submitting to calls for her to quit from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Her disclosure of the massive breach followed the revelation last month of a separate but related theft of the Social Security numbers and other information of 4.2 million current and former federal workers that was stored in a database maintained at the Department of the Interior.

Word of Archuleta’s resignation was applauded by members of Congress who had been pushing for her departure, charging that she had ignored warnings from her agency’s own inspector general to implement protective upgrades to OPM’s computer systems.

“This is the absolute right call,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “OPM needs a competent, technically savvy leader to manage the biggest cybersecurity crisis in this nation’s history.”

Republicans have sought to use the cyberattacks to accuse Obama of poor management, with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a leading GOP presidential candidate, last month charging that if he had been president, Archuleta would have been fired.

The head of the country’s largest federal employees union, however, blamed the breaches on deep cost-cutting by Congress.

“Budget austerity has consequences and we are seeing one of them right now,” said J. David Cox Sr., national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “OPM could and should have done a better job of cybersecurity with the resources they had. But going forward, I hope one lesson learned from these breaches is that when you refuse to fund the operations of government you will have hugely consequential failures.”

Archuleta will be replaced temporarily by Beth Colbert, a deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget, until a successor can be found.

This story was originally published July 10, 2015 at 4:05 PM with the headline "OPM chief resigns in wake of massive cyberattack."