The US Department of Justice today announced allegations of four Chinese military hackers allegedly behind the Equifax data breach revealing nearly 150 million Americans ' personal and financial data.
In a joint press conference with Procurator General William Barr and FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, DoJ officials today described the government-sponsored hacking operation as the largest ever discovered hacking case in this nature.These four charged with hacking and stealing of trade secret, intellectual property and confidential information from a number of other United States companies have been arrested recent years. Wu Zhiyong , Wang Qian , Xu Ke & Liu Lei .
In September 2017 Equifax revealed that it was victimized by an extensive cyber-attack which left almost half the US population in the hands of hackers with extremely sensitive data.
As reported earlier in The Hacker Review, hackers hacked Equifax servers through the Apache Struts Web Framework with a crucial flaw that their organization forgets to correctly, even when a secure software version is modified.
They used this link to identify Equifax's online dispute forum and to get login credentials for further Equifax's network navigation.
The defendants spent a number of weeks querying the systems of the Equifax database and searching for confidential, personal information in the Equifax framework
As alleged in the indictment, the defendant took steps to avoid detection during the intrusion. They used encrypted communication channels within the network of Equifax to blend with regular network activity and deleted compressed files and wiped log files on a daily basis to erase logs of their business activities through approximately 34 servers located in about 20 countries.
Because of this attack, the UK Privacy Watchdog prosecuted Equifax for not taking appropriate measures to protect its clients and also agreed to pay up to $700 million in fines in order to finish a number of state and federal enquiries in the U.S.The FBI started the investigation two years ago, the DoJ officials said with a total of 40 IP addresses involved in attacks leading to these four leaders of the 54th Research Institute of the People's Liberation Army.
The four potential suspects are still listed in the FBI's Most Wanted Cyber list, and are residing in China.This is not the first time China's intelligence officials have been prosecuted with hacking and cyber espionage by the US. On 2014, five Chinese military officials for hacking and cyber espionage against several American companies were also arrested with anonymous allegations.
Keep visiting for more update on this story