China’s government denied being involved in hacking after the feds fingered four members of the Chinese military in the massive 2017 Equifax data breach.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Tuesday the country’s institutions “never engage in cybertheft of trade secrets” following the federal charges against hackers from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army for allegedly breaking into the credit-reporting agency, exposing 150 million Americans’ personal information.
Geng also turned the tables on Washington and accused the US of “engaging in large-scale, organized and indiscriminate cyberstealing, spying and surveillance” against foreign governments, individuals and enterprises.
“China is also a victim of this,” Geng said.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Geng’s remarks.
The Equifax episode marks the US’s latest clash with China over the country’s alleged hacking of American targets. Chinese hackers have also been accused of infiltrating computer networks of steel manufacturers, a health insurer, a hotel chain and the US Office of Personnel Management.
The Trump administration has also warned world leaders to keep Chinese telecom giant Huawei out of their 5G cellular networks over concerns that the company’s gear could aid Beijing’s spying efforts, which Huawei has denied.
The four alleged Equifax hackers — Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei — bent over backwards to nab information such as Social Security numbers, addresses and birth dates in the massive September 2017 hack, according to federal prosecutors.
The men ran roughly 9,000 queries on Equifax’s system to steal the data and then covered their tracks by routing traffic through about 34 servers in almost 20 countries, the feds alleged Monday. The breach they allegedly caused kicked off a scandal that pushed Equifax’s CEO to resign and led the company to pay more than $700 million in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and 50 US states.
US Attorney General William Barr called the alleged hack “an organized and remarkably brazen criminal heist of sensitive information of nearly half of all Americans.”
With Post wires