Sensitive personal data of more than 130,000 sailors was stolen from a Navy contractor’s laptop, the service announced Wednesday.
In its news release, the Navy said it was notified in October by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services that a computer with data on a Navy contract was "compromised," and that the names and social security numbers of 134,386 current and former sailors were accessed.
"The Navy takes this incident extremely seriously – this is a matter of trust for our sailors," Vice Adm. Robert Burke said in a statement. "We are in the early stages of investigating and are working quickly to identify and take care of those affected by this breach."
According to Navy Times, the personal data came from the Career Waypoints database, known as C-WAY, which sailors use to submit re-enlistment and Navy Occupational Specialty requests.
Navy Times said it was at least the second major breach of Navy data linked to its contracting activities with Hewlett Packard.
In 2013, the service announced that Iran had penetrated its unclassified Navy and Marine Corps Intranet. It took four months for officials for purge the hackers from the system.
In June 2014, it was announced that Chinese hackers had infiltrated the Office of Personnel Management's computer systems; ultimately, it was found that 18 million troops and federal workers who had filled out security clearance paperwork had their personal data stolen – one of the largest breaches of federal data in history.
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