!! OPM IT outsourced to foreigner contractors, with root access, working from their home country. In this case, China http://t.co/d06zJgyan7

— John Schindler (@20committee) June 17, 2015

wut #OPMHack http://t.co/fiDjY8ofkd pic.twitter.com/ZzrOFBc5gz

— Political Math (@politicalmath) June 17, 2015

Some of the contractors that have helped OPM with managing internal data have had security issues of their own—including potentially giving foreign governments direct access to data long before the recent reported breaches. A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is 'so what's new?'"

President Obama is standing by Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Katherine Archuleta despite a series of massive data breaches that have shaken the federal government, the White House said Wednesday.

"The president does have confidence that she is the right person for the job," spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.

...

Earnest said updating OPM’s cyber defenses has been one of Archuleta's top priorities since she assumed her post in late 2013, but that is "obviously an ongoing process."

He said Archuleta and OPM Chief Information Officer Donna Seymour have cooperated as best as they can with a congressional inquiry into the hacks.

..

Archuleta and Seymour have been under fire since it was revealed that suspected Chinese hackers had made off with troves of federal workers’ data.