In October, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services notified the Navy that a laptop containing a reenlistment approval database, featuring the names and social security numbers of sailors, was breached.
“The Navy takes this incident extremely seriously — this is a matter of trust for our Sailors," Navy personnel boss Vice Admiral 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."
The investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has not yet found any malicious use of the data, the Navy Times reports, but are in the process of contacting sailors and are “looking into” credit-monitoring services for them.
A source told the website that the personal data that was compromised was the so-called Career Waypoints database, or ‘C-WAY,’ which is used by sailors for Navy Occupational Specialty requests, and to reenlist.
A Navy database was hacked by Iran in 2013, and remained compromised for four months. The breach was blamed on a contract being poorly written, and not requiring Hewlett Packard to provide security for unclassified databases.
