US charges four members of Chinese military with ‘organised and brazen’ hacking of Equifax credit agency
- US Justice Department blames Beijing for one of the largest hacks in history, which affected roughly 145 million people in 2017
- ‘We remind the Chinese government that we have the capability to remove the internet’s cloak of anonymity,’ Attorney General William Barr says
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged four members of the Chinese military with hacking into one of America’s largest credit reporting agencies and stealing the personal data of around half of all US citizens.
The alleged hack of Atlanta-headquartered Equifax also allowed the hackers, determined by the DOJ to be members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to obtain trade secrets related to the company’s database designs.
“This was an organised and remarkably brazen criminal heist of sensitive information of nearly half of all Americans,” US General Attorney William Barr, unveiling the nine-count indictment, said on Monday.
The four individuals alleged to have committed the 2017 cyberintrusion – Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei – were part of the PLA’s 54th Research Institute, the DOJ said. Their names are now listed on the FBI’s “most wanted” online database.
As well as obtaining the names, birth dates and social security numbers of around 145 million American citizens, the hackers also collected the driver license details of at least 10 million individuals and the credit card information of 200,000 people, according to the indictment.