Hacker claims to have stolen records of 1 billion Chinese citizens

A hacker claimed to have obtained a collection of personal information from Shanghai police on 1 billion Chinese people, which tech experts say, if true, will be one of the biggest data breaches in history.

The anonymous hacker, identified as “ChinaDan”, posted on hacking forum Breach Forums last week an offer of more than 23 terabytes of data for 10 bitcoins, the equivalent of about $200,000.

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

“The databases contain information about 1 billion Chinese national residents and several billion records including name, address, place of birth, national ID number, mobile number, all criminal details.”

Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the content. The Shanghai government and police department did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

Zhao Changpeng, chief executive of Binance, said on Monday that the cryptocurrency exchange stepped up user verification processes after the platform’s threat intelligence detected the sale of records belonging to 1 billion residents of an Asian country on the dark web. .

He said on Twitter that a leak could have been due to “a bug in an Elastic Search deployment by a (government) agency”, without saying if he was referring to the Shanghai police case. He did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

The data leak allegation comes at a time when China has pledged to improve privacy protection for online users’ data, instructing tech companies to ensure safer storage following public complaints about mismanagement and misuse.