How 4 Chinese Hackers Allegedly Took Down Equifax

#News(Security) [ via IoTGroup ]

In September 2017, credit reporting giant Equifax equifax-breach/”>came clean: It had been hacked, and the sensitive personal information of 143 million US citizens had been compromised—a number the company later revised up to 147.9 million.
In a sweeping nine-count indictment, the DOJ alleged that four members of China’s People’s Liberation Army were behind the Equifax hack, the culmination of a years-long investigation.
In terms of the number of US citizens affected, it’s one of the biggest state-sponsored thefts of personally identifiable information on record.
“This kind of attack on American industry is of a piece with other Chinese illegal acquisitions of sensitive personal data,” US attorney general William Barr said at a press conference announcing the charges.
“For years we have witnessed China’s voracious appetite for the personal data of Americans.”
That aggression dates back to a hack of the Office of Personnel Management, revealed in 2015, in which Chinese hackers allegedly stole reams of highly sensitive data relating to government workers, up through the more recently disclosed breaches of the Marriott hotel chain and Anthem health insurance.
Even in that group of impactful attacks, Equifax stands out both for the sheer number of those affected and the type of information that the hackers obtained.
While some had previously suspected China’s involvement—that none of the information had made its way to the dark web indicated a state actor rather than a common thief—Monday’s DOJ indictment lays out a thorough case.
Equifax, which used the Apache Struts Framework in its dispute-resolution system, ignored both.
Within a few weeks, the DOJ says, Chinese hackers were inside Equifax’s systems.
From there, the four alleged hackers—Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei—conducted weeks of reconnaissance, running queries to give themselves a better sense of Equifax’s database structure and how many records it contained.

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