China: Massive Data Theft, One Billion Citizens’ Details Sold for 10 BTC

The Chinese government planned to build blockchain technology that is transparent, secure, and free from speculation. And yet. Local regulators are now shocked by the actions of an anonymous person who claims to have hacked and stolen one billion people’s data measuring 23 terabytes. The person then sold it on the dark web for 10 BTC, or about US$203,562.

The account with the name ChinaDan claims to have succeeded in breaking into data from the Shanghai National Police (SHGA). The hacker obtained a large amount of information related to names, addresses, national identity numbers, contact info numbers, and criminal records.

ChinaDan released the information in the hacker forum Breach Forum. “The database contains information on China’s one billion national population and several billion case records, including names, addresses, places of birth, national ID numbers, mobile phone numbers and all details of crimes or cases.”

To be more convincing, the account also provided a sample of 750 thousand records.

ChinaDan also confirmed that the data taken was extracted from a private cloud provided by Aliyun, namely Alibaba’s cloud which is part of the Chinese police network.

Binance CEO Announces Data Hack

The CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), seems to have already made an alert about this data theft. In a Twitter thread on July 4, CZ announced that his security intelligence team detected the sale on the dark web.

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

The data sold includes names, addresses, identity numbers, mobile phone numbers, police records and also medical records.

Binance claimed to have taken precautionary measures by increasing verification for users who are potentially affected.

In a recent Twitter thread, CZ suggested that the hacking action could have occurred because the developer wrote a tech blog on CSDN and accidentally entered the credentials.

Apparently, this exploit happened because the gov developer wrote a tech blog on CSDN and accidentally included the credentials.

1 billion records of private citizens' data. ?? https://t.co/vPISm534Tn pic.twitter.com/FpMCGrpx08

— CZ ?? Binance (@cz_binance) July 4, 2022

China Pushes on With Blockchain Projects

Apart from the issue of hacking and data theft that is currently happening, the Chinese government seems to be continuing to boost the implementation of blockchain in its country.

The local government has selected 15 regional zones to start implementing the new technology.

Not only that, several applications based on innovative technology will also be tested using blockchain. The area that will become the test zone includes major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Cengdu and southern Sichuan.

Source: beincrypto.com