Did you hear about the massive data breach currently rocking the Trump administration?
No, silly, not the FBI data breach. Sure, ShinyHunters, a legendary hacking group, snatched up the personal data of what appears to be every FBI employee, including information on sensitive job assignments, but that’s only a paltry 38,000 people or so.
This time, we’re talking about a hack that put up some real big-boy numbers, a breach that affects over 3 million people with ties to the U.S. military. See? Now that’s a real hack, not those piddly tens of thousands over at the FBI.
Yes, the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower Data Center is apparently so leaky that it was wide open for nearly a year, with hackers having access from October 2025 to July 2026. But that’s okay, you see, because it was just a “small number of unauthorized users,” per the notice sent to people affected by the hack.
Related | FBI hack is even worse than it seems
The intruders got unencrypted names, contact information, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and military job information of almost 2.8 million living people and 294,000 dead ones.
Even in death, one cannot escape the sheer incompetence of this administration.
But gosh, not to worry, millions of people whose data was just there for the taking for close to a year, because the military is going to provide 12 months of credit monitoring to all of you.
Of course, that doesn’t really solve the national security problem of having so much military data leak, enough that criminals could impersonate service members and foreign intelligence services could figure out who they are. But hey! The DMDC manages over 60 million personnel records, so they’ve kept about 95% of those records safe! Surely that’s plenty, right?
The administration notified people about the breach and how they totally fixed it already. However, it hasn’t really seen fit to provide details on who did the hacking, whether all 3 million records accessed contained the same type of information, whether personal information was downloaded, and so on.
What, exactly, is going on with this administration that it keeps managing to get absolutely clobbered by hackers? Could it be that having a completely blithe attitude toward national security—so blithe that top Trump aide Natalie Harp seems to have worked in the White House without clearance for close to a year—is Bad, Actually?
The answer, of course, is that this is the natural consequence of firing everyone who had any actual experience. It’s how we got Signalgate, where top administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, breezily gabbed about an imminent bombing campaign against the Houthis on a Signal chat so insecure they accidentally invited Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to join in.
News of this latest hack comes at a time when Hegseth is running his mouth about how he and the military are going to get us all cybered up and super secure our elections. It all seems to highlight that no one is minding the store here. You can expect hackers to keep going after this incredibly target-rich environment, because why wouldn’t they?
Perhaps Trump can deploy some super intelligence to figure out how to stop the federal government from getting hacked as often as a grandpa with a bad habit of answering spam texts. That’ll fix it all, no doubt.
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