PLA Unit 54466
PLA 54th Research Institute (Strategic Support Force Unit 54466) members indicted by the U.S. DOJ on 10 February 2020 for the Equifax data breach of May–July 2017. Four military personnel — Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei — exploited a known Apache Struts vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) to exfiltrate personal data on 145.5 million Americans from Equifax's servers. The operation routed traffic through approximately 20 countries to obscure its origin and used 34 servers in nearly a dozen nations. The breach also targeted Equifax employees in the UK and Canada.
Aliases
Motivations
Target sectors
Target countries
Diamond Model
Caltagirone / Pendergast / Betz 2013 — four-vertex attribution framework.
MITRE ATT&CK techniques
Timeline
0 eventsIndicators of compromise
0 indicatorsRelated actors
shared ATT&CK techniques- CN · ChinaGTG-10023 shared techniques
- KP · DPRKAndariel2 shared techniques
- CN · ChinaAPT32 shared techniques
- RU · RussiaDragonfly2 shared techniques
- CN · ChinaFlax Typhoon2 shared techniques
- IR · IranPioneer Kitten2 shared techniques
References
- Four Members of China's PLA Indicted for 2017 Equifax HackU.S. Department of Justice · 2020-02-10
- FBI Most Wanted — Wu ZhiyongU.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation · 2020-02-10
- Actions Needed to Help Ensure Protection of Personally Identifiable Information (GAO-18-559)U.S. Government Accountability Office · 2018-08-01
cite this page
Threat Intel Tracker. (2026-05-19). PLA Unit 54466 — actor profile. Retrieved from https://threatintel.local/actors/pla-54466