An unknown hacker is spotted selling a database containing over one billion records – in a popular underground marketplace for 10 bitcoin.
The details include PII like the names, addresses, national IDs, phone numbers, and even the police and medical records. It’s reported that the hacker obtained this information from Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database, thus the information belonging to the Chinese.
One Billion Records For Sale
Hackers stealing data through some exploit and selling them on underground forums is common. We’ve seen multiple instances in the past where hackers stole records of millions of people and sold them for money.
But now, we see, maybe the world’s biggest deal ever. As the CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao pointed out, “Our threat intelligence detected 1 billion resident records for sell 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 included in this leak contain names, addresses, national IDs, phone numbers, and even police and medical records. He reasoned this leak was due to a bug in deployment by an unnamed government agency, without mentioning its name. He further stated that;
“It is important for all platforms to enhance their security measures in this area. Binance has already stepped up verifications for users potentially affected.”
Another report from Reuters noted that a user posting an ad for the sale of this database was found in a popular dark web marketplace – with the seller stating the dump to contain billions of Chinese citizens’ data, in about 23 TB size.
The report further stated that hackers obtained this data from the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database, through a leak in their systems. It’s now set up for sale for 10 Bitcoin, worth around $200,000 now.
The integrity of this data is yet to be verified, while an official response from the Shanghai National Police is also awaiting.
