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A US grand jury has charged four members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army with committing the infamous Equifax hack of 2017.
The hack was one of the largest personal data breaches in history. It resulted in numerous trade secrets and countless personal documents being stolen from the credit reporting firm.
The hack affected 150 million Americans. Attorney General William Barr called the 2017 hack “deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people.”
The hack was a major scandal for Equifax. It revealed a glaring hole in the company’s cybersecurity efforts. Afterward, millions of Americans took serious steps to protect themselves from identity theft.
Of course, a major question arises in this case: Why would China want to hack a major US credit reporting agency? Speculators believe that China could use the stolen trade secrets to help develop their online tools and financial software.
“This data has economic value and these thefts can feed China’s development of artificial tools,” the Attorney General told reporters.
The hackers used an obscure part of a webpage design tool to enact their digital heist. We later learned that Equifax had known about the security flaw, but they didn’t protect themselves from potential hacking efforts.
Worse still, the company didn’t even reveal the hack had taken place until three full months after the event.
This meant that a foreign government stole people’s information from Equifax, and they weren’t aware of it until three full months after it happened.
Equifax CEO Richard Smith resigned after the scandal. Officials then launched a full-scale federal investigation.
Authorities certainly must bring the hackers themselves to justice. But it is also the responsibility of reporting firms like Equifax to take better care of customers’ private information.
