Data of a billion Chinese residents available for sale on the dark web

Threat actors claim to have breached a database belonging to Shanghai police and stole the data of a billion Chinese residents.

Unknown threat actors claimed to have obtained data of a billion Chinese residents after breaching a database of the Shanghai police. If the incident will be confirmed, this data breach is the largest one in the country’s history.

“Shangai authorities have not publicly responded to the purported hack. Representatives for the city’s police and Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s internet overseer, did not immediately respond to faxed requests for comment.” reported Bloomberg.

The database contained names, addresses, birthplaces, national IDs, phone numbers, and criminal case information of Chinese citizens. The hacker is offering the database on a popular cybercrime forum for 10 bitcoins.

“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 $200,000.” reported Reuters.

The Chief Executive Officer of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Zhao Changpeng, on July 3rd, announced that the threat intelligence team of his company has detected 1 billion resident records available for sale in the dark web.

At this time, it is unclear how threat actors have obtained access to the database of the Shanghai police.

Cybersecurity experts speculate the data leak resulted from the compromise of a third-party cloud infrastructure service provider. 

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Chinese residents)