Unknown threat actors claimed to have obtained data of one billion Chinese residents, after breaching a database of the Shanghai police. If that is true, this data breach is the largest one in the country’s 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. The data includes names, addresses, birthplaces, national IDs, phone numbers and criminal case information.
Zhao Changpeng, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, tweeted last Monday that the company had detected the breach of a billion resident records “from one Asian country,” without specifying which, and had since stepped up its verification process for potentially affected users.
Shanghai authorities have not publicly responded to the purported data breach.
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