1 billion would be the potential victims of yet another theft of sensitive data by hackers. As Bloomberg reports, in recent months a single user or a team still not well specified, would have violated the databases of the Shanghai police, gaining access to the personal information of 1 billion Chinese. According to the source, the huge archive of 23 terabytes of data went on sale on the dark web for 10 bitcoins, over $ 198,000.
Following the event, the hashtag “Shanghai data leak” spread on Twitter. The data includes the names, addresses, places of birth, identification numbers of the identity cards and mobile phones of the victims.
The Wall Street Journal took possession of a portion of the archive, partially verifying its correctness by crossing public information about crimes in which the Shanghai police have been interested since 1995. It is not yet clear how the hacker has infiltrated the police database, but the first investigations speak of an access obtained through a cloud computing company of the Alibaba group, called Aliyun, on whose servers the archive was hosted.
Alibaba itself is investigating the matter. If confirmed, it would be the most serious in China’s history. The country has seen an escalation of security incidents in recent years. In 2016, sensitive information about Chinese managers and entrepreneurs was posted on Twitter, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma. By 2020, China’s most popular social network, Weibo, admitted data theft of more than 538 million users while In 2022, Chinese police servers in the Xinjiang region were hacked to steal evidence of the Beijing government’s abuses of Uyghur ethnic minority.
Source: Ansa
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