Personal info of 237,000 US govt staff breached

The personal information of 237,000 current and former US government employees has been exposed in a data breach.

The data breach hit systems for processing TRANServe transit benefits that reimburse federal government employees for some commuting costs. It was exposed by the US Transportation Department (USDOT), reports LiveMint.

It remains unclear if any of the personal information had been used for criminal purposes. The breach impacted 114,000 current employees and 123,000 former employees.

USDOT notified Congress in an email that its initial investigation of the data breach has "isolated the breach to certain systems at the department used for administrative functions, such as employee transit benefits processing."

The breach did not affect any transportation safety systems, USDOT said. It did not say who might be responsible for the hack.

The department is investigating the breach and has frozen access to the transit benefit system until it has been secured and restored, it said.

The maximum benefit allowance is $280 per month for federal employee mass transit commuting costs.

In the past, US government employees and agencies have been targets of hackers.

Two breaches at the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2014 and 2015 compromised sensitive data belonging to more than 22 million people, including 4.2 million current and federal employees along with fingerprint data of 5.6 million of those individuals.

Suspected Russian hackers who used SolarWinds and Microsoft software to burrow into US federal agencies breached unclassified Justice Department networks and read emails at the Treasury, Commerce, and Homeland Security departments. Nine federal agencies were breached, Reuters reported in 2021.