According to Bloomberg, the hacker is trying to sell 23 terabytes of data for 10 bitcoins, for roughly $200,000.
One billion Chinese data leaked
The data that was stolen by the hacker in China included real and non-fake names, addresses, places of birth, identity and phone numbers.
It is not yet clear how the hacker hacked the Shanghai police database, but it appears that he was able to steal the data via Alibaba’s Aliyun cloud computing company.
However, the story has not been proven true, but the company was already hosting the database and Alibaba Group is still investigating the incident.
Yi Fuxian, chief scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he downloaded data from the sample available online and found information about his county in Hunan Province.
“The data contains information about almost all provinces in China and I have even found data regarding a remote province in Tibet where there are only a few thousand residents,” he said.
In recent years, China has witnessed a number of hacking and data leakage incidents. In 2016, sensitive information was published about powerful and influential people in China, such as Jack Ma, founder of the Alibaba empire.
On Chinese social networks such as Wechat and Weibo, the hack was the talk of the worried users.
With more talk about the hack, the hashtag “Shanghai Data Leak” was blocked on China’s Weibo yesterday but there are still some discussions on Chinese social media about the incident.
Finally, the true extent of this data leak may be unknown, but according to cybersecurity experts, it is the largest cybersecurity breach in China’s history.
