The federal government is offering million-dollar identity theft insurance to millions of workers after hack

The entrance to the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building, which houses the Office of Personnel Management headquarters, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The public may never know the full national security repercussions of a pair of catastrophic hacking attacks on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that were disclosed earlier this month. The perpetrators appear to have breached OPM’s systems and scooped up personal information, including Social Security numbers, on millions of current and former federal workers and contractors.

The White House has thus far refused to pin the unprecedented intrusion on any one country, though Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has blamed “the Chinese.” The number of federal workers and contractors potentially affected is in dispute but seems to be escalating. And there are reasons to doubt early denials from OPM that the assailants made off with sensitive security information about intelligence staff and military personnel