Chinese army officers ‘hacked details of 15m Britons’

FOUR Chinese military officers have been charged in the US for stealing the personal details of almost half the American population, as well as up to 15 million people in Britain.

Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei – all members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and all living in China– have been accused of hacking credit reference agency Equifax in 2017. The US Department for Justice said the four were behind a threemonth campaign to steal the personal data of about 145 million ‘American victims’.

Investigators found that the hackers may have also compromised the data of 15million people in Britain, including their names and dates of birth.

This information is a treasure trove for fraudsters, who can use it to target victims with various scams. Describing it as ‘one of the largest data breaches in history’ and a ‘remarkably brazen criminal heist’, US attorney general William Barr launched a blistering attack on the Chinese government.

‘This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,’ he said yesterday.

‘Today, we hold PLA hackers accountable for their criminal actions, and we remind the Chinese government that we have the capability to remove the internet’s cloak of anonymity and find the hackers that nation repeatedly deploys against us.’

The broadside highlights the acrimonious relationship between the US and China, who have been locked in a bitter trade war.

Boris Johnson has faced a backlash in the US after defying Donald Trump’s plea to ban Chinese mobile phone giant Huawei from Britain’s 5G telecoms network amid security fears.