A Theft Before Equifax

I thought Equifax must be completely stupid when it lost all that data about people's credit records, but given the story in today's Wall Street Journal, the real problem may have been with the geniuses at the Justice Department who seem to have ignored almost everything while they played politics.  Equifax reported the theft of proprietary data to the FBI two years before the big theft of data took place.  The article describes the basics this way:  "In the previously undisclosed incident, security officials feared that former employees had removed thousands of pages of proprietary information before leaving and heading to jobs in China. Materials included code for planned new products, human-resources files and manuals." China, as it turns out, was building its own credit reporting agency and wanted the software (no doubt source code) the manuals (why write your own?), and the people necessary to make it work.

Seven years ago, when I wrote my first book, it was difficult to get anyone to believe the Chinese were stealing anything of that magnitude.  It was difficult to listen to the experts who were saying China was just competing with the US the way any other business did.  Now, most everyone can point to a place where China has stolen something, and we have to believe they are getting much more than we are detecting.  So, when the President of the United States says China is stealing our technology, he is really understating the problem.  They are stealing whole enterprises, including the people to manage and run the competition.  They are staging hacks that don't take anything, for a time when they may need something and want to be able to get it.  It has been so successful they can't quit.

Second, the China uses ethnic Chinese to do most of the thefts.  They send people to the best schools; they work in good jobs in the industries they are stealing;  they get US citizenship so they can work in sensitive places;  they buy people from those places.  "At one point, Equifax grew so worried it began building a way to monitor the computer activity of all of its ethnic-Chinese employees, according to people familiar with the investigation. The resource-heavy project, which raised legal concerns internally, was short-lived."

China uses our laws against us.  They have no problem monitoring their own people, but know we won't do the same here.  They hire lawyers, delay, and start building competing systems before the courts catch up with them.  By that time, the processes are embedded in their products and they have patented them in their own country.

Then their intelligence services can steal the information from those businesses that allow them to compete.  That can be used for further thefts and espionage.

Are we surprised the FBI did not do much to prevent what should have been an obvious theft in a way well known at that time?  The scale of these thefts exceeds their capability.
https://dennispoindexter.blogspot.com/