A hacker has claimed to have accessed a trove of personal information from the Shanghai police on 1 billion Chinese citizens, a source said, which would be one of the biggest data breaches in history.
The anonymous internet user, known as ChinaDan, offered to sell more than 23 terabytes TB of data for 10 bitcoins, equivalent to about $200,000 165,000 in 2022, according to the Shanghai National Police SHGA database leak. The post said that the database contains many TB of data and information on billions of Chinese citizens.
Databases contain information on 1 billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records, including name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, and all crime case details. Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the post.
The police and government of Shanghai didn't respond to requests for comment on Monday.
The post was widely discussed over the weekend on China s Weibo and WeChat social media platforms with many users worried it could be real, and Reuters was unable to reach the self-proclaimed hacker, ChinaDan.
The data leak was blocked on Weibo by Sunday afternoon.
Kendra Schaefer, head of tech policy research at Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China, said in a post on Twitter that it was difficult to parse truth from the rumour mill If the material the hacker claimed to have came from the Ministry of Public Security, it would be bad for a number of reasons Schaefer said.
She said it would be one of the biggest and worst breaches in history.
The CEO of Binance, Zhao Changpeng, said on Monday that the exchange had stepped up user verification processes after the exchange's threat intelligence detected the sale of records belonging to one billion residents of an Asian country on the dark web.
He wrote on Twitter that a bug in an Elasticsearch deployment by a government agency could have led to a leak, but he did not say if he was referring to the Shanghai police case. He did not respond immediately to a request for further comment.
China has pledged to protect online user data privacy and instruct its tech giants to make safer storage after public complaints about mismanagement and misuse.
Last year China passed laws governing how personal information and data generated within its borders should be handled.