Four members of China’s military have been indicted by the U.S. government on charges of hacking into the credit-reporting agency Equifax Inc. and plundering sensitive data on nearly 150 million Americans, the Justice Department said.
A federal grand jury in Atlanta returned a nine-count indictment last week that accused members of China’s People’s Liberation Army of conspiring to steal reams of data as part of a sophisticated hacking operation that exploited a major vulnerability in the software used by Equifax’s online dispute portal.
“This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,” Attorney General William Barr said.
The breach into Equifax, disclosed in 2017, compromised data belonging to about 145 million Americans and has been viewed as one of the largest hacks on record. It prompted prolonged public outrage and led to a series of hearings in Congress that led to the resignation of the company’s former chief executive, Richard Smith.