Hackers claim data leak affecting 1 billion Chinese citizens; database valued at 10 BTC

Unknown hackers are offering for sale a database that allegedly contains information on one billion Chinese citizens, priced at 10 BTC (more than $190,000 at the time of writing).

A listing appeared on на Breach Forums. The seller claims the data were obtained in a breach of the Shanghai police.

The database reportedly contains names, addresses, places of birth, documents, phone numbers of PRC citizens and case materials. Breach Forums blocked the sale post.

Several users have said the posted data is up to date. If the breach is confirmed in full, it would rank among the largest leaks in the country’s history.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said the company detected the sale of data on one billion residents on the dark web from “one Asian country.” He suggested the incident arose from a bug in an Elastic Search deployment by an unnamed government agency.

Our threat intelligence detected 1 billion resident records for sell in the dark web, including name, address, national id, mobile, police and medical records from one asian country. Likely due to a bug in an Elastic Search deployment by a gov agency. This has impact on …

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) July 3, 2022

Zhao added that Binance has strengthened checks on users potentially affected by the breach.

Bloomberg, citing cybersecurity experts, writes that hackers could have accessed Shanghai police data through an external cloud-infrastructure partner.

Earlier unknown hackers hacked the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region police databases in China and gained access to thousands of photographs of Uyghurs who had been subjected to repression. It is claimed that in the “re-education camps” in Xinjiang there are about a million detainees, most of them Uyghurs, held without trial.

In June, reported a data breach affecting OpenSea users, according to the non-fungible token platform.

Follow ForkLog’s bitcoin news on our Telegram — cryptocurrency news, prices and analytics.