These are some serious allegations. Read the whole story for the chilling insight and alleged incompetency. Here are some choice quotes:
“From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago,” he added. “And my take on the current breach is ‘so what’s new?'”
In fact, the breach was unprecedented in its breadth and scope: “Security-wise, this may be the worst breach of personally identifying information ever,”
Federal employees and contractors who want government-security clearance have to disclose virtually every aspect of their lives via a 120-page SF 86 questionnaire, which is then stored on OPM’s unencrypted database.
The OPM also “conducts more than 90% of all federal background investigations, including those required by the Department of Defense and 100 other federal agencies,” Reuters reported last week.
Experts fear the stolen information could be used by the Chinese government to blackmail, exploit, or recruit US intelligence officers, compromising the success and safety of agents operating at home and abroad.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.