I don't blame them since they were just doing their job. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber/chinese-pla-members-54th-research-institute I don't trust Facebook et al. either, but at least with them I can use fake information.
If you're communicating with others, you can't fake information, that defeats the purpose of communicating. Eg, "happy birthday" - just devulged a birth day. Sharing phone numbers, contact details, addresses, personal preferences eg "I prefer to...."
I'm in trouble now! Someday Mark Zuckerberg will be very unhappy with Buster Cherry. You might not have noticed that some EliteTrader members communicate with others and have Spoiler secret identities.
The problem is you don't know. And they don't let you know and there is no way to find out because there is no freedom of speech and no freedom of press. You don't know 100% about the companies in the west here either true. But we at least supposedly have freedom of speech and freedom of press. People can talk about it. Journalists can find out about it and report it when they are doing real investigative reporting and not chasing after Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. There is open source here where companies even openly publish their source code for everybody to see and even modify. That's the difference.
I hope these 145 million American citizens were duly identified by Equifax and have been promptly contacted and informed for them to change their identifiable information such as social security numbers, driver's license numbers and credit cards. And those personal identifiable information have been formally flagged as compromised so if any identity theft or fraudulent usage of them can be more easily detected. And Equifax needs to beef up its data security systems. It's an organization that people trust so much with their personal information and it get so little scrutiny on the security of its data. That is very disturbing.
Ah well at least now if you see somebody who has the same driver's license number and social security number as yours, you know where he/she got it from. In a way America really needs to thank these four brave Chinese PLA soldiers for exposing how crappy and really lacking of security American data management systems have. I mean if not for their meticulous and dedicated efforts, America would've never discovered its vulnerabilities and would be in complete complacency. That research institute of the Chinese PLA really did all the research for America. LOL America should invite the Chinese and Russian and any international hacking groups to do this more often. It should set up some mock government agency systems, online and offline and populate them with data and arm them with the latest security technology to make them look like they are extremely important and top-secret to have the hackers to have a go at them. And according to how they are hacked, America will know how and where they need to improve. Data security outsourcing! There you go.