A federal grand jury has indicted two associates of both”extremely sophisticated” hacking team working from China in the 2014-2015 convicted of their personal information of nearly 79 million customers of insurance Anthem Inc., the biggest known health care hack U.S. history.
The Justice Department said the two additionally murdered three other U.S.-based companies it did not name, one within the technology industry, the others in fundamental materials and communications.
The indictment unsealed Thursday alleges Fujie Wang, a 32-year-old who moves from the Western title”Dennis,” and also a guy with three listed aliases identified as John Doe stole data such as names, birthdates, Social Security numbers and medical IDs, initially obtaining Anthem’s network in May 2014.
After they were detected their access was not terminated until January 2015, the indictment states.
The nation’s second-largest health insurance, indianapolis-based Anthem, agreed last October to pay a record $16 million to the government.
Anthem said in a statement it was”pleased” with the indictment and worried that”there is no evidence that information acquired via the 2015 cyber-attack targeting Anthem has led to fraud.”
Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of this firm Hold Safety, stated there is no credible evidence any of the information that was stolen was put up for sale for use in identity theft. He explained the Anthem data will be more powerful”onto a lower-level degree” for purposes of espionage than it would be in private hands.
The indictment did not say whether U.S. police have evidence the hackers were working for the Chinese state. U.S. officials blame for state-backed Chinese hackers to get rampant evidence of Western intellectual property and trade secrets but didn’t lodge similar allegations from Thursday’s indictment.
A Justice Department spokeswoman had no comment when asked just how sure it is that Wang will be attracted to the U.S. for prosecution. The U.S. does not have an extradition treaty with China. The indictment says that the activities of Doe were China-based, and Wang lives in Shenzhen, China.
At a 2015 report, the cybersecurity company Symantec said the Anthem hack was first believed to be the job of a Chinese group had been actively conducting cyberespionage for three decades.
The indictment stated that Doe and many others in the hacking team utilized emails and other broadcasts to compromise those companies’ procedures. The two are charged with one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in relation to identity theft and computers, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and two counts of willful harm to a protected computer.
HHS stated its investigation found that Anthem had failed to deploy measures when Anthem agreed to pay $16 million in a settlement with the Department of Health and Human Services.
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Bajak contributed to the report.
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