New York Consumer Law Blog

Using the personal data of millions of Americans against their will is certainly alarming. But what’s the difference between the Chinese government stealing all that information and a data broker amassing it legally without user consent and selling it on the open market?

Both are predatory practices to invade privacy for insights and strategic leverage. Yes, one is corporate and legal and the other geopolitical and decidedly not legal.
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After the initial breach was announced on September 7, 2017, law enforcement officials and investigators turned their attention to China’s military. This was due in part to the fact that the Equifax data has never been found for sale on underground internet forums that usually involve the trade in this type of data to criminals who may use it to fraudulently obtain credit or tax return funds. 

By naming Chinese military officials, the Justice Department is finally confirming which nation’s military they suspect was behind the incident, which ultimately led to enormous upheaval at Equifax. The company’s CEO resigned, as well as its head of cybersecurity, Susan Mauldin, and chief information officer Jun Ying. 

Ying would later be sentenced to four months in prison for insider trading on the security incident before it was announced to the public, to profit from the information by $117,000.
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It would not surprise me if a victim of tax ID theft would also need to deal with credit theft.  Consumers can check their credit reports regularly for accounts that do not belong them.

Are computer errors (or even "coding errors") affecting your credit reports?   

Consumers can check their credit reports for free at annualcreditreport.
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