Official says hackers hit up to 25,000 fed workers

The Justice Department filed a civil complaint in January against USIS alleging that the firm defrauded the government by submitting at least 665,000 security clearance investigations that had not been properly completed and then tried to cover up its actions. USIS replied in a statement at the time that the allegations dealt with a small group of employees and that the company had appointed a new leadership team and enhanced oversight and was cooperating with the Justice probe

Your electronic medical records will be fine in the hands of the feds. Don't worry about that

At that point, DHS issued "stop-work orders" preventing further information flows to USIS until the agency was confident the company could safeguard its records. At the same time, OPM temporarily halted all USIS background check fieldwork "out of an abundance of caution," spokeswoman Jackie Koszczuk said.

Officials would not say whether workers from other government agencies were at risk. DHS will provide workers affected by the intrusion with credit monitoring. The risk to as many as 25,000 DHS workers was first reported Friday by Reuters.

A cybersecurity expert, Rick Dakin, said the possibility that other federal departments could be affected depends on whether the DHS records were "segmented," or walled off, from other federal agencies' files inside USIS