Hacker Claims To Have Stolen Data of 1 Billion Chinese From Police (nikkei.com) 39
A hacker has claimed to have procured a trove of personal information from the Shanghai police on one billion Chinese citizens, which tech experts say, if true, would be one of the biggest data breaches in history. From a report: The anonymous internet user, identified as "ChinaDan," posted on hacker forum Breach Forums last week offering to sell the more than 23 terabytes (TB) of data for 10 bitcoin BTC=, equivalent to about $200,000. "In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains many TB of data and information on Billions of Chinese citizen," the post said. "Databases contain information on 1 Billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records, including: name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, all crime/case details." Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the post. The Shanghai government and police department did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
That's a little sad (Score:3)
If my math is correct, every person can be boiled down to ~23k or something like 11 pages of text.
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10 BTC seems rather cheap too. If this is true then this guy is in serious danger, especially if he lives in China. The police and the government will be after him.
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Re:That's a little sad (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand, if he has family members on the mainland, they’re gonna pay dearly for this.
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China doesnt seem to be doing any overseas assassinations, unlike Russia.
Or the US, and Israel
Re: That's a little sad (Score:2)
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"If he’s in the US, he’s probably safe."
Do you think the CCP won't pressure its US sock puppet's(Apple, Google, Disney, etc) to find him and out him? And then the DOJ will take it from there.
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> If he’s in the US, he’s probably safe.
If he already works for the CIA and this was one of the projects he was assigned to work on, he's probably looking at a promotion.
Responsible (Score:4, Interesting)
The responsible thing to do would be to release it so the public can see what sort of profiles the government is creating.
But... the needs of the one outweighs the needs of the many, right?
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Maybe some rich person could step up and do it.
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Why would they need to be rich? Doesn't this place keep telling me bitcoins are worthless?
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They may be worthless but they're not valueless.
Yet.
Re: Responsible (Score:2)
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If they cared about that sort of thing they could release data of people who give permission, with certain parts like current address redacted. Journalists have experience of that kind of thing.
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Only asking for $200k... that's barely "cover my expenses" money if this hacker has to flee for life or endure a legal fight at some point. You do that kind of hack on China, there's big guns coming for you.
More like Winnie the Oh...Shit (Score:2)
Maybe we could sell the People of China some Freedom Phones?
1,5 billion people (Score:1)
1 billion criminals.
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I wonder how many US consumers^Wcitizens have a government file.
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"Are you automatically a criminal if the police pull you over?"
Yes. You lose social points.
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Shanghai's database almost certainly includes anyone who visits the city, and that makes 1B easily believable.
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China has 1.4B people, it is impossible for the police of just one city, even Shanghai, to have data on 1B out 1.4B of them.
Ah yes, because when a dissident arrives in Shanghai from Xinjiang, the Shanghai police just throw up there hands and say "on you go, we've never heard of you". It's impossible that they have access to a central database which has all the data.
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That's Stasi-level of citizen surveillance indeed.
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Have you ever lived or worked in China? The government is so compartmentalised and disorganised the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. There's no way they have a national police database. I mean, this is a country where a guy won a reality TV show contest in Beijing where the prize was a romantic holiday with the girl winner, and the police from another region called the girl asking if she knew where he was, because he was wanted for fraud. The police in different regions don't talk to
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In a police state, I would not be surprised if the database in question is actually the national database shared across all major cities' police departments.
Treasure Trove of Data on Chinese Dissidents. (Score:1)
I'm waiting for the data on one million police (Score:2)
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Western intelligence agencies already have this and much more, just like the CCP has this same data and much more on every American.
"Mostly Harmless" - that's what my record says (Score:2)
Latest Notification (FreeJobsAlert.Careers) (Score:1)