Huge.
Mr. Xi got some ‘splain’ to do...
MORE HERE FROM VOICE OF AMERICA:
https://www.voanews.com/usa/us-charges-chinese-military-officers-hacking-equifax
Four members of the Chinese military have been charged with hacking the computer networks of U.S. credit rating giant Equifax and stealing the company’s trade secrets and the personal data of nearly half of all Americans, U.S. law enforcement officials announced on Monday.
The 2017 Equifax data breach, one of the largest of its kind in history, resulted in the theft of about 150 million Americans’ names, birth dates, and social security numbers and the driver’s license numbers of at least 10 million Americans.
“The scale of the theft was staggering,” U.S. Attorney General William Barr said at a press conference. “This theft not only caused significant financial damage to Equifax but invaded the privacy of many millions of Americans, and imposed substantial costs and burdens on them as the have had to take measures to protect against identity theft.”
The four Chinese accused of carrying out the Equifax hack were members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s 54th Research Institute, according to a nine-count federal indictment returned on Jan. 28 in the Northern District of Georgia, The were identified as Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei and face charges of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, conspiracy to commit economic espionage and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The four have not been arrested.
The Justice Department does not normally bring criminal charges against members of a foreign country’s military or intelligence services. This is only the second time that federal prosecutors have charged members of the Chinese military , and it comes amid heightened U.S. concerns about Chinese economic espionage and theft of intellectual property.
“Today, we hold PLA hackers accountable for their criminal actions, and we remind the Chinese government that we have the capability to remove the internet’s cloak of anonymity and find the hackers that nation repeatedly deploys against us,” Barr said.
In 2014, the Justice Department indicted five members of the PLA’s cyber espionage arm with stealing confidential business information from U.S. companies and a trade organization.
The FBI is conducting roughly 1,000 investigations into suspected Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property, with many expected to result in criminal charges against individuals and companies later in the year, U.S. law enforcement officials said last week.
Let’s see...
1. Rumors abound that the Chinese lost control of a biological warfare development project in Wuhan and accidentally released 2019-nCoV
2. The Chinese government is telling its people that the bug is an American biowarfare agent released to kill Asians. Many people believe that.
3. The U.S. government says the Chinese military hacked Equifax.
What’s #4? Seems to be some tit-for-tat going on here.
That one was the final straw for me. I locked my credit. The 4th major breach of my data in 2 years.
bmp
Seems like an inappropriate way to deal with an act of espionage by members of a hostile foreign military acting under orders from that hostile foreign government. Those men will never stand trial and will receive no punishment. There needs to be some other form of retaliation...