Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday February 11 2020, @12:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the Funder-of-identity-protection-services dept.

Equifax: US charges four Chinese military officers over huge hack:

The US has charged four Chinese military officers over the huge cyber-attack of credit rating giant Equifax.

More than 147 million Americans were affected in 2017 when hackers stole sensitive personal data including names and addresses.

[...]Announcing the indictments, Attorney General William Barr called the hack "one of the largest data breaches in history".

According to court documents, the four are allegedly members of the People's Liberation Army's 54th Research Institute, a component of the Chinese military.

They spent weeks in the company's system, breaking into security networks and stealing personal data, the documents said.

The nine-count indictment also accuses the group of stealing trade secrets including data compilation and database designs.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @02:26PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @02:26PM (#956834)

    What is in it for China?

    Lacking that, it seems less than plausible.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @04:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @04:20PM (#956880)

    I think this is a good question, but I'd also ask another one in addition. How would we know?

    Increasingly we're claiming omniscience on things where you simply cannot know. Imagine for instance I took the most pedestrian level of anonymizing and I chose to connect to this website using TOR. My identity would be, for all intents and purposes, effectively impossible to discern. And that is civilian level protection. I've no idea what our guys (or theirs) are doing, but I suspect it's rather more sophisticated. Now let's take this one step further. Imagine I'm a hacker from one nation and not only have I hacked your grossly insecure servers, but I've also left a footprint to try attribute blame to another party. The NSA had a one of their fancy acronyms for our methods of doing such and deemed them highly effective.

    And somehow you get this down to not only the country, and not only the vicinity, but literally 4 exact people? Erm.. okay. Well okay, perhaps we have some high level spies in Chinese intelligence. That's possible, if not probable. I expect they similarly have spies inside of our institutions. Yet if so, why in the hell would you defacto announce this and give China a huge datum on where the mole is?

    So much of our propaganda against Russia and China is increasingly failing the smell test. It's possible there are some esoteric 4d level chess and strategies beyond human comprehension being played out, but it's also possible that a lot of this is just plain old hamfisted propaganda. And I think Occam's razor is pointing pretty squarely towards the latter.