Justice Dept. Charges China-backed Hackers Over Equifax Breach

U.S. prosecutors have charged four hackers said to be working for the Chinese military for the 2018 cyberattack at Equifax, which led to the theft of more than 147 million credit reports in a massive data breach. From a report: Attorney general William Barr accused the four members of the Chinese People's Liberation Army of hacking into the credit giant over a period of several months. The nine-charge indictment was announced Monday against Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei. "This is the largest theft of sensitive PII by state-sponsored hackers ever recorded," said FBI deputy director David Bowdich. Equifax revealed the data breach in September 2017, months after it discovered hackers had broken into its systems. An investigation showed the company failed to patch a web server it knew was vulnerable for weeks, which let hackers crash the servers and steal massive amounts of personal data.

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