Before It Was Hacked, Equifax Had a Different Fear: Chinese Spying

The article is about Equifax, but based on the histories and subsequent employment of other suspect individuals they are far from the only target. Any FI or related should be concerned.<p>The common goal seems to be to get their foot in the door within a subset of 3-5 American financial verticals (the &quot;b-b-but I just work in marketing!&quot; excuse as an <i>obscenely</i> common insider position that doesn&#x27;t attract any scrutiny at all, unlike someone working in engineering or R&amp;D. Seriously-- you want to find the spies in your company? Start with marketing), exfiltrate everything they can access and retreat to China for a cushy job and enjoyment of immunity against extradition. By the time the target catches on and law enforcement gets spun up, they&#x27;ve already finished their tour of duty with two to three other companies and are on a plane halfway across the Pacific.<p>It&#x27;s hard to do anything about it without either implementing literal racist policies or comprehensively overhauling an entire industry&#x27;s security posture, but it is what it is.

Wow. China holding over 1mm Muslims in &quot;re-education&quot; camps, forcing them to eat pork and drink alcohol. China steals everyone&#x27;s IP and knocks it off. China bullies the Philippines, a relatively poor country, out of some natural resources that might actually help it. Now China tries to steal the information of hundreds of millions of Americans. And today, the US proposed trade talks with China, rolling over for its money. Economic pressure stopped the Soviet Union, and we should try it on China too. Money is the only safe method of pressuring China into ending it&#x27;s atrocities. We should use it.

Some have suspected that a state actor may have been behind the breach, given the sophistication of the attack and the lack of reporting about fraudsters using the stolen data.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;features&#x2F;2017-09-29&#x2F;the-equifax-hack-has-all-the-hallmarks-of-state-sponsored-pros" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;features&#x2F;2017-09-29&#x2F;the-equif...</a>

Paywall bypass: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Visq4" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Visq4</a>

The same goes for every other company in that line of business, in the US as well as in Europe. The data in their databases has immense value for state actors and allows them to help identify those that could be easily compromised.

Didn&#x27;t seem to make them tighten their security any.

I guess they must have had really good security protocols in place if they were worried about being hacked by state actors.

I wonder if this has to do with Jack Ma stepping down?