A Chinese spokesperson has strongly denied that his government was behind the hack of Equifax in 2017, which saw the personal data of hundreds of millions of individuals stolen – including the names, birth dates and social security numbers for nearly half of all American citizens.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang was reacting to news that the US Department of Justice had charged four men, allegedly members of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), with orchestrating what the FBI has described as the “largest theft of sensitive personally identifiable information by state-sponsored hackers ever recorded.”
“The Chinese government, military and relevant personnel never engage in cyber theft of trade secrets,” Shuang was reported as saying. “It has long been an open secret that the US government and relevant departments, in violation of international law and basic norms governing international relations, have been engaging in large-scale, organized and indiscriminate cyber stealing, spying and surveillance activities on foreign governments, enterprises and individuals.”
In other words, if I may paraphrase Mr Shuang, “we here in China would never hack anyone… it’s you in America who do it!”
Hmm. I think it be more honest to admit that just about every country in the world is likely to be involved in cyberespionage – if only because it is a relatively cheap and safe way to conduct espionage and gain advantages over other countries, with an additional side benefit of being so easy to deny responsibility.
According to the United States, the hackers (Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei were all members of a unit of the PLA, the 54th Research Institute.
They are accused of not only gaining unauthorised access to Equif ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
