Federal managers should allow their employees to use working time to enroll in the services the government is offering following therecently disclosed hack of a central federal personnel database, OPM has said.
It said that employees may be granted duty time and may use government computers and telephones to contact a contractor chosen by OPM, called CSID, to register for identity theft protection.
“OPM strongly encourages agencies to allow employees to reach out to CSID while on duty time. If an employee does not have Internet access, OPM strongly encourages agencies to work with those individuals, as appropriate, to provide them access,” OPM said in a posting on its website.
Virtually all federal employees are being sent emails to their work addresses—in most cases, by the end of this week—regarding what personal information of theirs might have been lost and offering credit monitoring and identity theft protection services. Those emails come from “OPM CIO” at the address opmcio@csid.com.
A link steers recipients to www.csid.com/opm, where they are required to provide personal information to begin the credit monitoring services. An email about the breach from a different address could be a phishing attempt and employees should make sure they are going to the correct address for enrollment, it added. Employees uncertain about the origin of an email should contact their agency’s privacy officer.
