The four individuals who were identified and indicted by the Trump Administration in relation to the Equifax breach from 2017 is yet another example of the overt collection efforts by the Chinese government to steal Americans’ sensitive personal information. The openness of the U.S. government to share these examples should help bring the reality of cyber threats to the forefront in corporate board rooms and research universities. I would like to highlight that these particular attacks were conducted for a different goal – espionage.

A federal grand jury in Atlanta, Ga. returned an indictment last week charging four members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with hacking into the computer systems of the credit reporting agency Equifax and stealing Americans’ personal data and Equifax’s valuable trade secrets.

A class action settlement has been proposed in a case against Equifax Inc., relating to the data breach that Equifax announced in September 2017, which affected approximately 147 million U.S. consumers.