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Comment by jayess | Hacker News Reader

The indictment is linked at the bottom of the page and has interesting technical details.

Even more interesting is the question of how the named individuals were identified, which is not addressed in the indictment. The indictment also includes photos of three of the people indicted. This comes across as a shot across the bow to show China that the US govt can identify the individual people doing these things.

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Yep, they even say that in the link.

"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."

If this ever goes to trial, the defense-discovery of how it was done will be interesting.

Unless they use parallel reconstructionism to keep their (probably Tor) deanonymizing skillset on the down low.

If the prosecutors were to do so knowingly, the prosecutors would be breaking their oath to the Constitution (and simultaneously obliterating their case/perhaps committing crimes of their own).

Like that hasn't happened before with no consequences when investigative forces were handed a cool new toy.

The prosecutors aren't likely doing so knowingly. It's more likely that the clean evidence is what gets sent to the DOJ.

That's the line that stood out to me. If so, the threat sounds like they could turn it off or reveal everyone at once, not so much a selective attack (why announce it like that then? Certainly not if you were going to use parallel reconstruction to keep the fact secret).

However, the line:

> 34 servers located in nearly 20 countries

Doesn't describe tor. You don't use that many servers (nodes). And it's strength isn't based on number of hops. That's more old school hack a box and put in a chain.

Then what's the cloak? Is their ability that they can easy "go around" somehow any X number of connections right to the source?

"In connection with the management and protection of its databases, Equifax developed and maintained proprietary compilations, processes, and codes that constituted trade secrets, for which it had taken reasonable measures to keep secret..."

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