Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is a government game

Forget lone hackers and gangs of digital outlaws: Governments, acting for good and ill, have become the prime movers in the cybersecurity world.

What's happening: Three big stories this week drove home government's central role in a myriad of major breaches, hacks and scams.

1. Equifax: Monday, the Justice Department indicted four members of China's military for executing the 2017 Equifax data breach, which exposed the personal data of nearly 150 million Americans.

• Equifax had already agreed to a settlement with state and federal authorities for hundreds of millions of dollars, one that focused on efforts to recompense consumers harmed by the breach and to provide incentives to businesses to batten down their hatches against similar future attacks.
• By attributing the breach to China and bringing the receipts, the U.S. made clear that what had seemed to be a business story was in fact more about China's hunger for data on U.S. citizens — and the ability of its state-employed actors to execute one of the largest data heists in history.