'The scale of the theft was staggering': Justice Department indicts Chinese military hackers who stole Equifax data

Attorney General William Barr announced the indictment of four members of the Chinese military for their role in the massive 2017 Equifax hacking that breached sensitive personal data on an estimated 145 million people in the United States.

The nine-count indictment announced during a Justice Department press conference on Monday morning, charged Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei, of the People’s Liberation Army’s 54th Research Institute. They allegedly conspired to hack into Equifax’s computer networks and stole massive amounts of information from the consumer credit reporting agency.

“This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,” Barr said. “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.”

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