[ddoolin]

I wonder why the say "appears to have had," is that an assumption or was it stated somewhere? Without an offline backup, it would indeed be a very serious problem, more than it already is.

[n4r9]

My reading is: "The agency would surely be panicking more than this if they didn't have an offline backup".

[rob74]

"Offline backup", as in "thousands of shelves full of dusty binders spread across offices all over the country"?

[throw1234567891]

Yup. Everyone’s job safe for the next few years!

[rob74]

"And to think that we just finished digitizing all those paper files five years ago! Oh well, back to square one..."

[embedding-shape]

I think the "offline" part is what is that "appears" to be, clearly they have backups somewhere, but maybe the attacker just missed to wipe some other "online" location.

[sixothree]

I interpreted this as a vagueness related to the reporting accuracy, not the existence of a backup.