A hacker (or group of hackers) claims to have stolen information on a billion Chinese residents from a Shanghai police database. According to Bloomberg, the hacker is making an attempt to promote 23 terabytes of information for 10 bitcoin, which is price simply over $198,000 on the time of writing.
The information consists of names, addresses, birthplaces, nationwide IDs and telephone numbers. The Wall Street Journal experiences that the hacker supplied a pattern of the information, which included crime experiences relationship way back to 1995. Reporters confirmed the legitimacy of at the least a number of the information by calling folks whose numbers have been listed.
It’s not but clear how the hacker infiltrated the police database, although there have been solutions that they gained entry by way of an Alibaba cloud computing firm referred to as Aliyun, which was stated to host the database. Alibaba stated it is investigating the matter.
The true scope of the leak is unknown. However, cybersecurity specialists have dubbed it the largest cybersecurity breach in China’s historical past.