Last week, an anonymous hacker identified as “ChinaDan” put 23 TB of data for sale on Breach Forums. This data is currently being bid for around 10 Bitcoin (BTC), or 200,000 USD at current exchange rates.
The hacker claimed to have stolen the data of 1 billion Chinese users after breaching a Shanghai police database. This includes names, addresses, places of birth, citizen identification numbers, phone numbers as well as all their background, crime details, etc. Yi Fu-Xian, a scientist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, downloaded the sample data posted by the hacker and found information about the county where he lived.
“The data contained information about almost every county in China and I even discovered data regarding a remote county in Tibet with a population of only a few thousand people. It was worse than what was revealed”, Yi Fu-Xian said.
This attack also prompted Binance to strengthen its user verification process to increase security. According to CEO of Binance Zhao Changpeng, the leak could have happened due to “a bug in an Elastic Search deployment by a (government) agency”, but he did not specify whether the “government agency” was Shanghai police.
Over the past few years, China has been plagued with data leaks. In 2016, the personal information of many Chinese powerful individuals including Alibaba founder Jack Ma was posted on Twitter. This forced the government to pass new laws on the management of personal information last year. ChinaDan’s post is widely discussed on China’s social media platforms with many users worried it could be real.
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