Hacker claims to have stolen 1 b records of Chinese citizens from Police

SHANGHAI (Reuters): A hacker has claimed to have procured a trove of personal information from the Shanghai Police on one billion Chinese citizens, which tech experts say, if true, would be one of the biggest data breaches in history.

The anonymous internet user, identified as “ChinaDan”, posted on hacker forum Breach Forums last week offering to sell the more than 23 terabytes (TB) of data for 10 bitcoin, equivalent to about $ 200,000.

“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.” Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the post.

The Shanghai Government and Police department did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

Reuters was also unable to reach the self-proclaimed hacker, ChinaDan, but the post was widely discussed on China’s Weibo and WeChat social media platforms over the weekend with many users worried it could be real. The hashtag “data leak” was blocked on Weibo by Sunday afternoon.

Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China Head of tech policy research Kendra Schaefer said in a post on Twitter it was “hard to parse truth from rumour mill”.

If the material the hacker claimed to have come from the Ministry of Public Security, it would be bad for “a number of reasons”, Schaefer said. “Most obviously it would be among biggest and worst breaches in history,” she said.

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