The US has charged four members of the Chinese military for the hacking of credit reporting agency Equifax in 2017.
The hack exposed data of 145 million, according to US attorney general William Barr.
In a statement, the US Department of Justice says a federal grand jury in Atlanta returned an indictment last week charging four members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with hacking into the computer systems of the credit reporting agency Equifax and stealing Americans’ personal data and Equifax’s valuable trade secrets.
It adds that the nine-count indictment alleges that Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei were members of the PLA’s 54th Research Institute, a component of the Chinese military.
They allegedly conspired with each other to hack into Equifax’s computer networks, maintain unauthorised access to those computers, and steal sensitive, personally identifiable information of approximately 145 million American victims, the justice department says.
“This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,” said Barr, who made the announcement.
“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.
“Unfortunately, the Equifax hack fits a disturbing and unacceptable pattern of state-sponsored computer intrusions and thefts by China and its citizens that have targeted personally identifiable information, trade secrets, and other confidential information.”
According to the indictment, the defendants exploited a vulnerability in the Apache Struts Web Framework software used by Equifax’s online dispute portal.
It says they used this access to conduct reconnaissance of Equifax’s online dispute portal and to obtain login credentials that could be used to further navigate Equifax’s network.
The defendants spent several weeks running queries to identify Equifax’s database structure and searching for sensitive, personally identifiable information within Equifax’s system.
Once they accessed files of interest, the justice department says, the conspirators then stored the stolen information in temporary output files, compressed and divided the files, and ultimately were able to download and exfiltrate the data from Equifax’s network to computers outside the US.
In total, it notes, the attackers ran approximately 9 000 queries on Equifax’s system, obtaining names, birth dates and social security numbers for nearly half of all American citizens.
The indictment also charges the defendants with stealing trade secret information, namely Equifax’s data compilations and database designs.
“In short, this was an organised and remarkably brazen criminal heist of sensitive information of nearly half of all Americans, as well as the hard work and intellectual property of an American company, by a unit of the Chinese military,” said Barr.
The defendants took steps to evade detection throughout the intrusion, as alleged in the indictment.It adds that they routed traffic through approximately 34 servers located in nearly 20 countries to obfuscate their true location, used encrypted communication channels within Equifax’s network to blend in with normal network activity, and deleted compressed files and wiped log files on a daily basis in an effort to eliminate records of their activity.
“Today’s announcement of these indictments further highlights our commitment to imposing consequences on cyber criminals no matter who they are, where they are, or what country’s uniform they wear,” said FBI deputy director David Bowdich.
“The size and scope of this investigation – affecting nearly half of the US population, demonstrates the importance of the FBI’s mission and our enduring partnerships with the justice department and the US attorney’s office. This is not the end of our investigation; to all who seek to disrupt the safety, security and confidence of the global citizenry in this digitally connected world, this is a day of reckoning.”
The defendants are charged with three counts of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, conspiracy to commit economic espionage, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
They are also charged with two counts of unauthorised access and intentional damage to a protected computer, one count of economic espionage, and three counts of wire fraud.
Share