Story highlights Chinese and Russian intelligence services are looking to target American government workers for counter-intelligence

Many U.S. government agencies still lack urgency in addressing the problem

Washington (CNN) Chinese and Russian intelligence services are collecting personally identifiable information on a grand scale so they can target American government workers for counter-intelligence, a U.S. official told CNN Tuesday.

China has been particularly active, the official said, part of a national strategy to target the U.S.

The foreign spy agencies use a massive database analysis to combine and cross-reference information obtained from cyberattacks on targets ranging from the Office of Personnel Management to the cheating website Ashley Madison to identify and potentially compromise operatives.

"Individually, the OPM breach and the Ashley Madison breach both present significant dangers to U.S. personnel, including intelligence personnel, but taken together, they really ratchet up the level of harm," said Marc Zwillinger, a lawyer handling data breach and privacy cases. "The OPM breach has confidential information about U.S. personnel and people that have applied for security clearances, and the Ashley Madison breach reveals people's most intimate secrets about the affairs they might be having, and together, it provides a lot of leverage that could be used to blackmail and possibly influence U.S. personnel."

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