Three days ago, Anonymous claimed to have hacked the US Census Bureau, in order to protest against the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade agreements.
Today, John H. Thompson, US Census Bureau Director, writes about the hack of the Federal Audit Clearinghouse :
“Earlier this week, the Census Bureau experienced an attack to gain access to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, which is housed on an externally facing IT system that contains non-confidential information, such as names of the person submitting the information, organization addresses and phone numbers, site user names, etc.
While our IT forensics investigation continues, I want to assure you that at this time every indication is that the breach was limited to this database, and that it did not include personally identifiable information provided by people responding to our censuses and surveys.
It appears the database was compromised through a configuration setting that allowed the attacker to gain access to the four files posted to the hacker’s site. The hackers acquired the data illegally, but as I indicated above, the Clearinghouse site does not store any confidential household or business data collected by the Census Bureau.
That information remains safe, secure and on an internal network segmented apart from the external site and the affected database. Over the last three days, we have seen no indication that there was any access to internal systems.
Within 90 minutes of learning of the breach, we made the system inaccessible.
It will remain offline until we can complete our thorough investigation and take steps to ensure the systems integrity in the future.”
