Four Chinese hackers were charged for Equifax data breach

Equifax data breach in 2017 was a historic incident in cybersecurity industry that exposed the personal and financial details of 143 million Americans. The attackers behind this huge data breach was identified to be four Chinese government sponsored military hackers. The United States Department of Justice announced the details of the hackers over their press release and in a join press conference held on Feb 10th with David Bowdich theFBI Deputy Director and William Barr the Attorney General.

Four hackers who were accused of this data breach are Xu Ke, Liu Lei, Wu Zhiyong, and Wang Qian. They have been charged with stealing intellectual property, confidential information, trade secrets, social security numbers, names, birth dates, credit card numbers, and passwords. It is believed that these hackers have made at least 9000 unique queries to fetch the details of the Americans and other businesses in the America.

Looking back at the Equifax data breach

The hackers have compromised Equifax servers by exploiting a Apache Struts vulnerability in their web framework. Hackers used this loophole to breach into Equifax’s online dispute portal, fetch the credentials for logging-in, and then ran numerous queries to study the DB framework, and PII details. After accessing the required information, the attackers then stored the details in temp files by compressing them, and then finally extracting them from the Equifax network.

They disguised themselves as an encrypted communication to build trust with Equifax servers. They have also spoofed their original location by masking themselves through 34 servers and from 20 countries. Also they left no track of their activity by deleting the log files when they accomplished their mission and extraction.

Equifax paid £500K as a penalty for breaching the U.K’s privacy norms, including $700 million for United States. 

More cyber espionage

The four Chinese hackers are now residing in China, and have been included as the most wanted cyber criminals of the FBI. This is not the first time when Chinese hackers have been penalized for attack on the United States, in 2015 two Chinese hackers were charged for massive data breach on American Health Company and in 2014 again five Chinese hackers were charged for cyber espionage over the American companies.

Last month US official arrested Aleksei Burkov for multiple cyber crimes, and three Indonesian hackers were arrested for MageCart attacks.

Cyber criminals are operating 24*7 to extract data and cause havoc to businesses, please stay secured with the right cyber strategies to defend against them.