Security News
Threat actors linked to China increasingly targeted the telecommunications sector in 2019, according to endpoint security firm CrowdStrike. In the case of the telecom sector, many of the attacks were attributed to China-linked hacker groups, including the ones tracked as Wicked Panda, Emissary Panda, and Lotus Panda.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Monday that two Chinese nationals have been charged with laundering over $100 million worth of cryptocurrency stolen by North Korean hackers from a cryptocurrency exchange. According to authorities, Yinyin and Jiadong laundered over $100 million worth of cryptocurrency, mostly obtained as a result of a cyberattack launched in April 2018 by North Korean hackers.
Two Chinese nationals have been charged by the US Department of Justice and sanctioned by the US Treasury for allegedly laundering $100 million worth of virtual currency using prepaid Apple iTunes gift cards. According to a newly unsealed court document, the illicit funds originated from a $250 million haul stolen from two different unnamed cryptocurrency exchanges that were perpetrated by Lazarus Group, a cybercrime group with ties with the North Korean government.
Over just the last three years, Chinese cyber criminals have gone from relatively solitary players to adopting the same tactics favored by organized crime syndicates in Russia and other nations with lax cyber crime laws and enforcement. "According to 2018 Internet Development Statistics, China's cybercriminal underground was worth more than US $15 billion, nearly twice the size of its information security industry. The same Chinese-language source also shows that China's cybercrime is growing at a rate of more than 30 percent a year. An estimated 400,000 people work in underground cybercriminal networks."
The US has charged the Chinese military with plundering Equifax in 2017. According to the indictment, the four allegedly pried open Equifax by exploiting a vulnerability in the Apache Struts Web Framework software used by the credit reporting agency's online dispute portal.
The officials gathered for the China Initiative Conference, an event that explored Chinese intellectual property transgressions. China engages in a broad spectrum of trade theft activity, including not just hacking but also physical theft, inappropriate use of materials licensed from joint ventures, and information fed to it by insiders working at western companies, they said.
The U.S. Justice Department today unsealed indictments against four Chinese officers of the People's Liberation Army accused of perpetrating the 2017 hack against consumer credit bureau Equifax that led to the theft of personal data on nearly 150 million Americans. While the DOJ's announcement today portrays Equifax in a somewhat sympathetic light, it's important to remember that Equifax repeatedly has proven itself an extremely poor steward of the highly sensitive information that it holds on most Americans.
Four members of the Chinese military have been charged with breaking into the networks of the Equifax credit reporting agency and stealing the personal information of tens of millions of Americans, the Justice Department said Monday, blaming Beijing for one of the largest hacks in history to target consumer data. The case is the latest Justice Department accusation against Chinese hackers suspected of breaching networks of American corporations.
Four members of China's People's Liberation Army have been indicted for allegedly hacking Equifax in 2017 and stealing the personal data of over 145 million Americans as well as a vast trove of the company's trade secrets and intellectual property, the U.S. Justice Department announced Monday. U.S. Attorney General William Barr called the Justice Department's investigation of the Equifax data breach one of the largest and most complex criminal investigations ever undertaken.
The United States today announced criminal charges against four Chinese Army soldiers who, it is claimed, are the hackers who stole 145 million Americans' personal data from credit scorer Equifax. Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei, are all said to have been members of the People's Liberation Army's 54th Research Institute hacking team, and are accused of illegally accessed Equifax's customer databases.