The anonymous internet user, identified as ‘ChinaDan’, posted on hacker forum Breach Forums last week offering to sell more than 23 terabytes (TB) of data for 10 bitcoins, equivalent to around $200,000 (£165,000). “In 2022, the database of the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) was leaked. This database contains several TB of data and information on billions of Chinese citizens,” the post said. “The databases contain information on 1 billion resident Chinese nationals and several billion case records including: name, address, place of birth, national ID number, mobile phone number, all crime/case details.” Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the post. The Shanghai government and police did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. Reuters was also unable to contact the self-proclaimed hacker ChinaDan, but the post was widely discussed on China’s Weibo and WeChat social media platforms over the weekend with many users worried it could be real. The “data leak” hashtag was blocked on Weibo by Sunday afternoon. Kendra Schaefer, head of technology policy research at Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China, said in a Twitter post that it was “difficult to sort truth from rumours”. If the material the hacker claimed came from the Department of Public Safety, it would be bad for “a number of reasons,” Schaefer said. “Obviously it would be one of the biggest and worst breaches in history,” he said. Zhao Changpeng, CEO of Binance, said on Monday that the cryptocurrency exchange has strengthened user verification procedures after the exchange’s threat intelligence detected the sale of files belonging to one billion residents of an Asian country on the dark web. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST He tweeted that a leak could have occurred due to “a bug in an Elastic Search deployment by a (government) agency,” without saying whether he was referring to the Shanghai police case. He did not immediately respond to a request for further comment. The allegation of a hack comes as China has pledged to improve privacy protections for users’ data online, instructing its tech giants to ensure more secure storage following public complaints of mismanagement and misuse. Last year, China passed laws governing how personal information and data generated within its borders is handled.
