This would be one of the biggest data leaks in history. An unknown hacker or hacker group writing under a pseudonym “ChinaDan” will keep data from Shanghai police base as well as home delivery companies. A billion citizens could be affected.
China was quick to censor information on the topic, including popular hashtags on Weibo, Chinese Twitter, some WeChat posts and some links on the Baidu search engine.
A subsidiary of Alibaba was affected
On Thursday, June 30, the hackers offered to sell the files on a cybercrime forum for 10 bitcoins, or nearly $200,000. 750,000 posts posted online. These files are sensitive because they contain names, identity numbers, dates and places of birth and summaries of incidents recorded by the police between 1995 and 2019.
The Wall Street Journal was able to confirm with five citizens whose names appeared in the files that the information about them is correct. Among them there is information that only the authorities can have.
The attack reportedly targeted Aliyun, a cloud computing subsidiary of Alibaba Group that hosts the Shanghai police database. On Monday, Binance CEO Zhao Changpeng tweeted that he discovered the hack and “Install checks for potentially affected users.”
“Our threat intelligence has identified records including name, address, ID card, mobile phone, police records and medical records of 1 billion residents of the Asian country being sold on the dark web. Probably due to an error by the government agency deploying Elastic Search.”
The extent of the hacking attack has not been confirmed at this time. According to the Wall Street Journal, cybersecurity experts call the attack a“alarming”although reminding that one should beware of the statements and requests of hackers, which are even more anonymous.
Source: Le Figaro
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.