Four Chinese military members charged for Equifax data hack
Equifax, a credit reporting agency suffered data breach back in year 2017 resulting in of about 150 Million Americans’ personal data and financial data infringed. Four Chinese military members got arrested by accusing for the same.
According to the Attorney General William barr and FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, this state-sponsored hacking campaign was the largest case uncovered: “This theft not only caused significant financial damage to Equifax, but invaded the privacy of many millions of Americans, and imposed substantial costs and burdens on them as they have had to take measures to protect against identity theft.”
Wu Zhiyong (吴志勇), Wang Qian (王乾), Xu Ke (许可) and Liu Lei (刘磊) are the names of the four accused members of the Chinese military who involved in stealing the secrets and intellectual properties of several various US bunnies entities in recent years.
Chinese government on the accusations
After the accession of the four Chinese military, the country denied the involvement of any breach activities claiming that China is also the victim of this attack. The foreign minister, Geng Shuang, said the china is not engaged in such cyber-attacks involving theft of trade secrets. Also, they accused the US government of such spying activities on foreign governments, individuals and institutions.
However, Chinese hackers have been involved in various breaches and hacking attacks on American corporations, chains and government institutions before this attack even. By looking such experiences, the administration of the US president already warned the people about the china activities, and cyber security.
AG barr, in a press conference, said: “80 percent of our economic espionage prosecutions have implicated the Chinese government, and about 60 percent of all trade secret theft cases in recent years involved some connection to China.”
The something known about Equifax breach
The attackers obtained the information includes names, birthdays, social security numbers and other financial and personal information of over 150 Million Americans after accessing to their computer networks. This breach also affected the credit card numbers and PLL of 200,000 consumers and million customers’ data from the UK and Canada.
In addition to the network hacked, attackers exploited the Apache Struts framework vulnerability. This vulnerability allowed them to hack the online dispute portal and moved through the system of weeks, stealing credentials and planting malware on the device. The hackers also managed to reroute the traffic via 34 servers located in 20 different countries and this way the locations remains undisclosed and the detection about the intrusion was not possible.
