Hacker wants 10 Bitcoin in exchange for Chinese citizens’ stolen data

by Derek McKinney | Posted on

An anonymous hacker has offered to sell the stolen personal data of over 1 billion Chinese citizens for 10 Bitcoin (BTC), roughly $200,000.

The data includes the names, birthplaces, addresses, phone numbers, national ID, criminal information, and other information of private citizens in the country.

The hacker reportedly gained access to the Chinese Shanghai police database stealing over 26 terabytes of personal data.

Many initially questioned the credibility of the hacker’s claim given the size and impact of such data. But the hacker revealed some parts of the data to show the extent of the damage.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao acknowledged the claim. Earlier today, he tweeted that his company’s threat intelligence detected someone offering to sell the data of a billion residents from an Asian country.

According to CZ, the breach was likely “due to a bug in an ElasticSearch deployment by a gov agency.” However, he has confirmed that the exploit was because “the gov developer wrote a tech blog on CSDN and accidentally included the credentials.”

Zhao said that Binance has improved its security measures to verify affected users. He also called on other platforms to do the same.

Authorities in China are yet to confirm or deny the breach.

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