Hackers stole the data of 1 Billion Chinese citizens, selling them online for nearly 200,000 USD

Since last week, a database that can contain information about about 1 billion Chinese citizens is being put up for sale on the Breach Forum. The seller of this data block, named ChinaDan, is demanding 10 Bitcoins, equivalent to 200,000 USD. This could be the biggest user data leak in Chinese history.

This post quickly attracted  300,000 visits and  177 replies in just a few hours. And this database belongs to the Shanghai police.

The ChinaDan post said: “In 2022, the database of the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) was leaked. This database contains many terabytes of data and information about Billions of Chinese citizens.”

The seller said: “I am holding in my hand a sample of the dataset with 750,000 files from the database. Sample data has been uploaded to the forum's server.

The database contains information about 1 Billion residents of Chinese nationality and billions of records including: name, address, place of birth, National ID number, mobile phone number, all crime details offense.” And they are also linked to the user's Alipay account. It seems that this data block was leaked from Alibaba's private cloud server.

One user said: "I personally believe 98% of this data is real. They may not be completely updated but sometimes the system still crashes and the data can be exposed. Either way. Whoever it is, selling data publicly on a website like this for such a low price is either insane or just wants to humiliate the government."

This post will be closed by Forum administrators this coming Sunday. Someone has also offered to pay 6 BTC for this block of data.

Meanwhile, this post for sale of the database was hotly discussed on Chinese social networks including Weibo and WeChat over the weekend. Not long after that the hashtag "data leak" was blocked on the Weibo platform.

Breach Forums has just launched since March of this year and is promoted as a replacement for the RaidForums forum, which was shut down by the US government earlier this year following the arrest of its administrators.

Source: https://www.asiamarkets.com