Pentagon personnel breach — undetected for months — renews cyber standard scrutiny

The Defense Manpower Data Center suffered a long-running unauthorized access incident from October 2025 to July 16, 2026 that exposed unencrypted personnel records — including Social Security numbers and other PII — for roughly 2.76 million living individuals and additional deceased persons; the agency patched a file‑sharing vulnerability, restored the system, and is offering affected people credit monitoring while investigators and federal responders assess impacts and contextual risks amid other recent federal breaches and AI-enabled threat concerns.