Nation states continuously piercing VA database detailing 20 million veterans

Foreign actors have repeatedly accessed an unencrypted database maintained by the Veterans Affairs Department. The system houses personal information on tens of millions of veterans. “China and possibly Russia are responsible for the hacking,” according to congressional investigators.

VA networks have posed “an unacceptable risk for at least three years as sophisticated actors use weaknesses in VA’s security posture to exploit the system and remove veterans’ information and system passwords.”

The perpetrators coded the excised information, so VA could not discern what kind of data they were after.