Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
On Monday morning, the Department of Justice announced the indictment of four members of China’s military in connection with the 2017 hack of credit reporting agency Equifax, which exposed sensitive information for some 150 million Americans in 2017.
According to the indictment, the group hacked into Equifax’s systems in Alpharetta, Georgia, starting in May 2017, exploiting a vulnerability in the Apache Struts framework used by Equifax. The massive breach exposed names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver’s license numbers, with credit card numbers for more than 200,000 people and other personally identifying information for approximately 182,000 people also compromised.
“The scale of the theft was…