Unknown threat actors claim to have breached a database belonging to Shanghai National Police and stole the data of over 1 billion Chinese residents.
Shanghai authorities have not publicly responded to the supposed hack. Also the 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 according to Bloomberg.
The database contained details such as 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.
Reuters reported that the anonymous user, identified as “ChinaDan”, posted on hacker forum Breach Forums last week offering to sell more than 23 terabytes (TB) of data for 10 bitcoins, equivalent to about $200,000.
ChinaDan also shared a sample with 750,000 records containing delivery info, ID information, and police call records. The threat actor confirmed the data was exfiltrated from a local private cloud provided by Aliyun (Alibaba Cloud), part of the Chinese police network (aka public security network).
The CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Zhao Changpeng, confirmed that the threat intelligence team of his company has detected 1 billion resident records available for sale in the dark web.
It is not known how threat actors have obtained access to the database of the Shanghai police. It is also not possible to confirm the scale of the data leak now.
As per cybersecurity experts, the data leak is believed to be from the compromise of a third-party cloud infrastructure service provider.
If ChinaDan’s claims are proven to be accurate, then this data breach would be the largest one in the country’s history.
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