The US government has charged four Chinese military hackers over 2017’s massive Equifax breach in which personal details of nearly 150 million Americans were stolen – This is over 40% of the entire population of the United States.
The stolen data included full names, social security numbers (SSN), addresses, birthdays, driver license numbers, credit card data, and dispute documents with personal identifying information, etc. The breach also affected people in Canada and the United Kingdom.
See: Personal data of millions of Americans exposed from PC in China
However, on Monday 10th February, US Attorney General William Barr announced the indictments and charged four individuals namely Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei, all allegedly members of People’s Liberation Army. It is worth noting that in 2013, China admitted running the cyber warfare unit in the People’s Liberation Army.
According to court documents [PDF], the nine-count indictment alleges that these hackers spent weeks finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in Equifax’s cyberinfrastructure and managed to steal highly sensitive records of US citizens along with other documents including trade secrets.
In September 2017, Baird Equity Research released a report revealing that Equifax breach was the result of a security vulnerability in the Apache Struts framework, an open-source Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework that helps in buildin ..
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