The Washington Free Beacon's Bill Gertz appeared on The Dennis Prager Show to discuss the Chinese cyberattack on the United States and the latest developments in the Benghazi investigation.
Gertz reported that nine major cyber attacks targeting the personal data of millions of Americans were carried out against federal and private computer networks in the past year, according to an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security:
The July 2 report by the department’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center stated that two of the incidents involved "millions" and "hundreds of thousands" of stolen personal records respectively in what appears to be a coordinated campaign of bulk personal data theft.
A U.S. defense contractor was also hit by the data breaches.
The report did not identify the hackers behind the attacks, but stated that they were conducted by sophisticated attackers.
The report indicates that the Chinese-origin cyber attacks against Office of Personnel Management networks is part of a larger-scale operation targeting the personal data for intelligence or military purposes.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has said China is the leading suspect behind the OPM attacks. Beijing has denied responsibility for the OPM network breaches that President Obama has called a cyber attack.
A total of 22.1 million people, mainly federal workers, had their personal data stolen by the hackers. The information stolen includes sensitive data such as Social Security numbers, fingerprints, passwords, and information used in conducting background screening for security clearances.
The DHS report, "Large-scale PII Breach Incidents," was based on reporting by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or U.S.-CERT, a unit that responds to cyber attacks. The report provided technical details of the year-long campaign of cyber thefts against what it calls "personally identifiable information" or PII.
"To me, it's a scandal that the Obama administration is allowed to remain silent on what is shaping up to be one of the most damaging compromises of internal, sensitive information since Edward Snowden flew off to Hong Kong with over a million classified documents," Gertz said. "This is the second major security breach. It's clear that security is not a priority for the Obama administration despite what White House spokesman Josh Earnest will say at the daily briefings."