Military Identity Files Expose National Security Risk

A months‑long file‑sharing vulnerability at the Defense Manpower Data Center exposed roughly 2.8 million living service members' records (including Social Security numbers and identity links) and nearly 300,000 deceased records, creating risks to individual privacy and to credentialed access to Pentagon systems and bases. The breach reveals that identity‑management databases are strategic infrastructure: compromising them can enable espionage, supply‑chain attacks, or broad identity fraud. — This reframes identity‑management databases as national‑security infrastructure in need of the same legal, technical, and oversight protections as weapons and communications systems.