The federal prosecutors just recently announced on Monday, Feb. 10, that they will be charging four Chinese hackers who are intelligence officers for illegally collecting information from the credit-reporting giant known as Equifax. This event may be the largest data breach in history, and the United States is now pressing charges!
Information of these Chinese hackers
According to officials, this hack was made by members of well-known China's People's Liberation Army who have been heading Beijing's aggressive patterns of mining for private data to better their own intelligence operations and to target domestic companies specifically.
The benefits of these hacks could be used all the way from business to other, more drastic actions.
The charges against these hackers
The charges took place in a grand jury located in Atlanta with nine different counts of the indictment against the current PLA operatives Wu Zhiyong, Xu Ke, Liu Lei, and also Wang Qian on Jan. 28. The charges include wire fraud, economic espionage, conspiracy leading to computer fraud, and many other offenses. This hack has been described as the biggest theft of sensitive data by hackers sponsored by the state that has ever been recorded. The United States is pressing charges against all four of them.
The specifics of this attack
The hack was able to obtain certain sensitive financial records, which were about 150 million Americans and also a huge bit of foreigners. The Equifax breach was disclosed in 2017. The company finally agreed to pay a settlement of $650 million dollars after a long two years of lawsuits left and right.
How the hackers moved into Equifax
The first move of these Chinese hackers on Equifax was on May 13, 2017, and according to the recent indictment, that is the first time they were able to get into Equifax's network. There was reportedly a flaw in the existing software, which was known as the Apache Struts, and the hackers used this as a portal into Equifax's more sensitive data. They were able to obtain login credentials from this target for them to be able to access different parts of the network.
A huge number of weeks were spent targeting sensitive data with about 9,000 search queries, which would lead to sensitive data such as but not limited to Social Security numbers, and what is worse was passport photos were also dug up by these hackers. Once they were able to obtain the files they wanted, the hackers were crafty enough to change their IP address to make sure that the data mining did not sound any alarms.
Equifax's faults on the manner
In some ways, Equifax also shared a small chunk of the responsibility because of the failure to uphold security measures to a level of safety. Equifax did not heed warnings about the hackers targeting them and still run their system on very thin security methods. This led the Chinese hackers to attack Equifax. The U.S. is pressing Charges to put these hackers behind bars.
