In what could be regarded among the largest data spills of all time, a solid data breach of 1 billion Chinese individuals have been claimed to be gotten hold of by hackers, that too to top it off, from a database of Shanghai police.
While the data breach has not been publicly confirmed by Chinese authorities, many cybersecurity experts and individuals over the web and forums have confirmed the spill.
A principal research scientist at the cybersecurity firm Sophos, while mentioning this data breach has stated the development to be “potentially incredibly embarrassing to the Chinese government”.
Here’s everything you need to know about the breach.
1 Billion Chinese Individuals’ Data Comprised from Police Database
As per a recent post on the online hacking forum Breach Forums, an anonymous user by the username ‘ChinaDan’ has claimed to have hacked data of 1 billion Chinese individuals from the Shanghai police database, and has offered to sell it for 10 Bitcoin, which is roughly worth around $200,000.
The size of the leaked data is known to be almost 24 TB, including information on 1 billion people and ‘several billion case records’, as per news reports.
Shanghai National Police has not immediately responded to the issue, and as per reports, the leaked data contains information including names, addresses, national identification numbers, mobile phone numbers and case details, as mentioned being leaked from the database of Shanghai National Police.
A person has mentioned that while going through the content of leaked data, one entry was of an individual born in the year 2020, with their age listed as ‘1’, depicting that there are information available on minors too in the leaked data list.
“Everyone, please be careful in case there are more phone scams in the future!,” mentioned an individual in a Weibo post.
“When you’re talking about a billion people’s information and it’s static information, it’s not about where they travelled, who they communicated with or what they were doing, then it becomes very much less interesting,” said the expert Chester Wisniewski.
“The information, once it’s unleashed, is forever out there. So if someone believes their information was part of this attack, they have to assume it’s forever available to anyone and they should be taking precautions to protect themselves,” he added.
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