The hack of the century? A hacker recovers the personal data of a billion Chinese

Hundreds of thousands, millions, then tens of millions… Year after year, the mass piracy and data leakage are becoming more and more widespread, and when it affects China, it exceeds one billion!

Reuters thus reveals that a hacker has seized the personal data of a billion Chinese citizens, and it would be one of the biggest hacks in history. This hacker, who calls himself “ChinaDan”, posted last week on the forum Breach Forums a message where he offers to sell more than 23 TB of data for 10 bitcoinsor about $200,000.

Name, address, place of birth…

According to him, the data is taken from the Shanghai National Police database and contains information on one billion Chinese residents such as name, address, place of birth, mobile phone number but also details of their criminal record or complaint. Basically anything the police have on citizens.

The Shanghai government and police department did not respond to questions from the news agency. Silence also at the author of the hack, and it is therefore difficult to know if this data leak is proven. But in his message posted on the dark webthe hacker gave some details about his take and he explained that he had retrieved the data from a remote server provided by Aliyun (Ali Baba Cloud), and that he was part of the Chinese police network.

Victims confirm…

CEO of Binance (specialist in cryptocurrencies), Zhao Changpeng, said on Monday that his company had stepped up user verification processes to prevent hackers impersonate of possible people present in this huge file. According to him, it is initially a bug in the state’s deployment of Elastic Search, a database search engine. He adds that the vulnerability originated when a developer posted a technical article online that accidentally included the credentials.

For his part, the wall street journal contacted dozens of people whose data was allegedly stolen in this hack and some of them validated all the information available in the leaked sample. ” At this stage, it is impossible to confirm the extent of the data leak, but five of those contacted have checked all the profiles listed with their names, and this is information that would be difficult to obtain from a source. other than the police”concludes this leader on Twitter.