The U.S. government says it's concluded "with high confidence" that the Social Security numbers of 21.5 million people were stolen from government background investigation databases.
The Office of Personnel Management says that number includes 19.7 million individuals who applied for a background investigation and 1.8 million non-applicants, who it says are primarily spouses and cohabitants of the applicants.
OPM says the 21.5 million records are in addition to the 4.2 million individual records it had originally identified as being stolen from its computers.
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
