Fifty days of radio silence followed as OPM scrambled to understand what had happened. Even other parts of the Obama administration couldn’t get straight answers. The Office of Management and Budget, one senior official recalled, received conflicting information about how big the breach was. “I don’t think they were lying to us,” one of their senior officials said. “I think they didn’t know how many computers they had, much less who was on them.” The security company Cylance helped sort through the wreckage; a technician working on the case wrote a pithy email to the company’s chief executive:
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