China spent years collecting Americans' personal information. The U.S. just called it out.
When Attorney General William Barr announced Monday that the U.S. had charged four Chinese military hackers in the giant Equifax hack of 2017, he also confirmed something that cybersecurity experts had long suspected: China was also behind the hack of information on some 500 million Marriott hotel guests in 2018.
Barr also mentioned the 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management, another major breach that included sensitive information from about 21.5 million Americans who had done work for the federal government.
In doing so, Barr publicly confirmed that China has been collecting troves of personal data on U.S. citizens for years. Beginning around 2014, a host of American organizations that store personal identifying information were hacked, with either the government or major private cybersecurity firms attributing China’s Ministry of State Security as the culprit each time. Personal identifying information, or PII, includes names, addresses, birthdays and Social Security numbers.
