In what could be the biggest data breach ever, sensitive personal information about more than a billion people has possibly been leaked from a government agency out of China, and put up for sale on the dark web for 10 bitcoins.
Changpeng Zhao, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, tweeted that his threat intelligence unearthed 1 billion resident records for sale on the dark web. “This includes the name, address, national ID, mobile, police and medical records of an Asian country. Possibly due to a bug in the ElasticSearch deployment by a government agency,” Zhao claimed in his tweet late Monday.
He further posted, “This has implications for hacker detection/prevention measures, mobile numbers used for account acquisition, etc. It is important for all platforms to enhance their security measures in this area.” Zhao said that Binance has accelerated verification for potentially affected users.
Media reports claimed that the leaked data could be of Chinese citizens as a user on an underground hacking forum claimed to have sold a 23TB database of billions of Chinese citizens for 10 bitcoins. The information may have leaked from the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database, although the Chinese government was yet to react.
“In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains multiple TB of data and information about billions of Chinese citizens, said in a post by a user named ‘Chinadan’ that also went viral on Telegram.
“The database contains 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,” the post said.
According to the RFA report, the data breach was also referenced on Twitter by rights activist Fu Jianni, who said the leak was from the “Shanghai Public Security Database”.
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The report noted, “Most likely it was leaked from Alibaba Cloud.”
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