An anonymous hacker has claimed to have stolen the personal information of one billion Chinese citizen, constituting the biggest data theft in history.
‘ChinaDan’ claimed he lifted the information from the Shanghai police, and offered the 23 terabyte data trove to interested buyers on Breach Forums, at a cost of 10 bitcoin, or roughly A$295,000.
“In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains many TB of data and information on Billions of Chinese citizen,” the post said.
“Databases contain information on 1 Billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records, including: name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, all crime/case details.”
While the Shanghai police are yet to confirm the breach, Zhao Changpeng, CEO of Binance, seemingly refers to the breach, referencing “a bug in an Elastic Search deployment by a (government) agency” for his reason to step up the user verification processes for Binance.
He said the exchange’s threat intelligence “detected the sale of records belonging to 1 billion residents of an Asian country on the dark web.”