U.S. charges Chinese military with Equifax hacking

Four members of the Chinese military perpetrated one of the biggest data breaches in history, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said Monday. The 2017 hacking of the credit reporting agency Equifax exposed the names, addresses, Social Security and driver’s license numbers, and other personal information of 145 million people. “The scale of the theft was staggering,” Barr said.

Can the United States arrest the hackers? Not while they are in China, which they are. But U.S. officials said charges like those just levied against the hackers can act as a deterrent to foreign cybercriminals and serve as a warning to other countries that U.S. law enforcement can pinpoint individual culprits behind such attacks.

Dig deeper: Read Kent Covington’s report in The Sift about Equifax’s $700 million settlement over the hacking, which exploited a weakness the company knew about but didn’t fix.