In the USA, four Chinese military officers of the PLA army have been arrested and charged with stealing the personal details of 145 million people. They are accused of hacking the credit reference company Equifax over a three month period.  They are also believed to have hacked the information of 15 million UK citizens and that data includes name and date of birth.

This is one of the biggest data breaches ever and it’s not known if the information has been published on the Internet. If so, it could leave a lot of people open to scammers.

The American authorities are making a clear point to China that their hacking enterprises have to stop.

Countries carrying out espionage is nothing new but the Chinese do appear to have industrialised the process and continue to use PLA army specialists to acquire information from American and European companies and that is then passed on to Chinese businesses to give them an advantage.

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