A hacker has claimed to have procured a trove of personal information from the Shanghai police on 1 billion Chinese citizens, which tech experts say, if true, would be one of the biggest data breaches in history.
The anonymous Internet user, identified as “ChinaDan,” posted on hacker forum Breach Forums last week offering to sell the more than 23 terabytes (TB) of data for 10 bitcoin, equivalent to about US$200,000.
“In 2022, the Shanghai National Police database was leaked. This database contains many TB of data and information on Billions of Chinese citizen,” the post said. “Databases contain information on 1 Billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records, including: name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, all crime/case details.”
Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the post.
The Shanghai government and police department did not respond to requests for comment.
Reuters was also unable to reach the self-proclaimed hacker, ChinaDan, but the post was widely discussed on China’s Sina Weibo microblogging site and the WeChat messaging platform over the weekend, with many users worried it could be real.
The hashtag “data leak” was blocked on Sina Weibo by Sunday afternoon.
Kendra Schaefer, head of tech policy research at Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China, wrote on Twitter that it was “hard to parse truth from rumour mill.”
If the material the hacker claimed to have came from the Ministry of Public Security, it would be bad for “a number of reasons,” Schaefer said.
“Most obviously it would be among biggest and worst breaches in history,” she said.
Binance chief executive officer Zhao Changpeng (趙長鵬) on Monday said that the cryptocurrency exchange had stepped up user verification processes after the exchange’s threat intelligence detected the sale of records belonging to 1 billion residents of an Asian country on the dark Web.
He wrote on Twitter that a leak could have happened due to “a bug in an Elastic Search deployment by a gov agency,” without saying if he was referring to the Shanghai police case.
He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The claim of a hack comes as China has vowed to improve protection of online user data privacy, instructing its tech giants to ensure safer storage after public complaints about mismanagement and misuse.
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