The hackers are accused of stealing the sensitive personal information on some 145 million Americans, in one of the world’s largest ever data breaches, said Attorney General Bill Barr.
“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,” Barr said. US officials believe the Chinese military and security service are collecting personal data on Americans for strictly intelligence purposes.
Atlanta-based Equifax is one of three giant, little-regulated credit-raters who sweep up financial data on all Americans – their credit cards and banking activity especially – that necessarily comes with identifying data like their addresses and social security numbers. Investigators said the Chinese, using encrypted channels, ran some 9,000 queries through Equifax’s computing systems to obtain, divide, compress and exfiltrate the data, bit by bit.In a statement Equifax thanked the Justice department for its help and pledged to better protect consumer data.