Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is hammering a congressional office for its lax cyber protection of servers holding complaints of sexual harassment on Capitol Hill.
Until Wyden pressed the issue with the congressional Office of Compliance in late February 2018, the Washington Post reports, the information was stored by an outside contractor on an insecure server. Now, the servers are reportedly offline in a congressional facility.
According to the Post, Wyden wrote a scathing letter to the office’s Deputy Executive Director Paula Sumberg. “The OOC’s astonishingly lax security measures provide the means for hostile actors to access, modify, delete, or disseminate embarrassing and compromising information about legislative branch staff who have reported incidents of sexual harassment,” the Senator wrote.
He asserted his shock that the office would “watch as other federal government institutions were systematically targeted by foreign intelligence agencies and decide that it did not need to take even the most rudimentary steps to protect itself and the sensitive data which has been entrusted to it.”
