SHANGHAI: A hacker has claimed to have obtained a trove of private information from the Shanghai police on one billion Chinese residents, which tech specialists say, if genuine, would be one of the biggest data breaches in history.
The unknown Internet user, identified as ChinaDan, posted upon hacker forum Breach Forums last week providing to sell the more than 23 terabytes (TB) of data intended for 10 bitcoin, equal to about US$200, 000.
“In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains a lot of TB of data and information on vast amounts of Chinese citizen, ” the post stated.
“Databases contain information on 1 billion dollars Chinese national occupants and several billion situation records, including: Title, address, birthplace, nationwide ID number, cellular number, all crime/case details. ”
Reuters was unable to verify the genuineness of the post.
The Shanghai federal government and police department did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
Reuters was also unable to reach the particular self-proclaimed hacker, ChinaDan, but the post has been widely discussed on China’s Weibo plus WeChat social media platforms over the weekend with many customers worried it could be real.
The hashtag “data leak” has been blocked on Weibo by Sunday mid-day.
Kendra Schaefer, head of technology policy research from Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China, said within a post on Twitter it was “hard to parse truth from rumour mill”.
If the material the particular hacker claimed to get came from the Ministry of Public Protection, it would be bad for “a number of reasons”, Schaefer said.
“Most obviously it would be amongst biggest and most severe breaches in history, ” she said.
Zhao Changpeng, TOP DOG of Binance, mentioned on Monday the cryptocurrency exchange experienced stepped up consumer verification processes following the exchange’s threat cleverness detected the sale for records belonging to 1 billion residents of an Asian country around the dark web.
He said upon Twitter that an outflow could have happened because of “a bug within an Elastic Search deployment by a (government) agency”, without saying in case he was referring to the Shanghai police case. He did not immediately respond to the request for further remark.
The claim of the hack comes as China has vowed to improve protection of on-line user data personal privacy, instructing its tech giants to ensure safer storage after open public complaints about mismanagement plus misuse.
This past year, China passed new laws governing how personal information and information generated within the borders should be handled.
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