A hacker has offered to sell what he claims is a database containing records of more than one billion Chinese civilians, allegedly stolen from Shanghai police, on a data breach discussion and news forum.
A few days ago, reports began circulating about a message posted on the Breached.to forum (the post is no longer available because it was deleted) in which HackerDan offered to sell the lot for 10 bitcoins or around $200,000.
In the forum, he posted sample data: one contains delivery addresses and often, instructions for drivers; another contains police records; and the last contains personal identification information such as name, national identification number, address, height, and sex.
“In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains several TB of data and information on billions of Chinese citizens. »
China has a national police force, which presumably has an office in Shanghai. But it is difficult to find an entity called "Shanghai National Police". However, the media have been able to verify that the content of the sample, whatever the source, is reliable.
While the government and Shanghai Police Department remained largely silent about the leak, social media platforms Weibo and WeChat did not, at least until Sunday afternoon, when Weibo users began receiving blocked hashtags related to the data breach.
Back in 2020, an American academic revealed the existence of a database of 2,4 million people that, he said, had been compiled by a Chinese company known for providing information to intelligence, military and security agencies.
The investigator had alleged that the purpose of the database was to enable influence operations against prominent and influential people outside of China.
Security researcher Robert Potter and Balding co-authored a paper stating that this database is called the Overseas Key Information Database (OKIDB) and that, while most of this data could have been extracted from social media or other publicly available sources, 10-20% of this information does not appear to have come from any public source. The co-authors do not rule out hacking as the source of this data, but also state that they cannot find any evidence of such activity.
Whatever the source of the leak, it will greatly upset China. The country's government has recently prioritized the protection of personal data and the security of critical infrastructure. China passed a law that, according to authorities, "improves" existing provisions for the protection of personal data.
The new "Personal Information Protection Law of the People's Republic of China" came into force on November 1, 2021. It consists of eight chapters and 74 articles that establish both strict and vague measures on how collected and managed data is handled, on the rights of individuals and the identity of the final owner of the data. – This was stated by the Chinese Administration.
Binance CEO Zhao Changpeng tweeted that his company's threat intelligence experts detected the hacker's claims and said the leak was likely caused by a bug in the ElasticSearch database, the search engine used by a Chinese government agency.
The hacker claimed the data was extorted from Aliyun, a cloud computing system and a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, which they said hosts the Shanghai police database.
Although the extent and accuracy of the leak remain unconfirmed, the Wall Street Journal contacted several of the citizens whose data was leaked, some of whom verified that the information was, in fact, correct.
Source: https://www.theregister.com