But by then the government knew it had to do something. The previous year, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management—the very agency that stores the most sensitive data for millions of federal employees and contractors, including detailed personal, financial, and medical histories, Social Security numbers, even fingerprints—revealed that it had been hacked by Chinese hackers on a scale the government had never seen before. The Chinese had been inside OPM’s systems for more than a year by the time they were discovered in 2015.
