Largest Data Leak in China! Hackers Claim Theft of Police Info in Biggest Cybercrime
Unknown hackers claimed to have stolen data on as many as a billion Chinese residents after breaching a Shanghai police database, in what industry experts are calling the largest cybersecurity breach in the country’s history.
The person or group claiming the attack has offered to sell more than 23 terabytes of stolen data from the database, including names, addresses, birthplaces, national IDs, phone numbers and criminal case information, according to an anonymous post on an online cybercrime forum last week. The unidentified hacker was asking for 10 bitcoin, worth around $200,000.
The scale of the alleged leak has sent shockwaves through the Chinese security community, triggering speculation about the credibility of the claim and how it could have taken place. Zhao Changpeng, founder and Chief Executive Officer of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, tweeted on Monday the company had detected the breach of a billion resident records “from one Asian country,” without specifying which, and had since increased verification procedures for potentially affected users.
Shanghai authorities have not publicly responded to the purported hack. Representatives for the city’s police and Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s internet overseer, did not immediately respond to faxed requests for comment.
The US and other nations have repeatedly identified China as one of the world’s biggest sources of cybercriminals, which they say infiltrate systems on behalf of domestic agencies in search of valuable data or intellectual property.
Domestic breaches are however rarely disclosed because of a lack of transparent reporting mechanisms. In 2016, personal information on dozens of Communist Party officials and industry figures
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