A hacker is said to have stolen the personal data of at least 1 billion Chinese after he broke into the Shanghai police database. The hacker, going by the name ChinaDan, is selling his loot online for a price of at least 10 bitcoin (BTC)† These bitcoins have a value of approximately $20,000 at the time of writing.
Bitcoin hacker
The hack took place sometime earlier this year. Then the astronomical amount of data was put up for sale on the dark web. The data includes the names, addresses, telephone numbers and other personal information of Chinese citizens.
The hacker has revealed that he is selling a large amount of data on Broken.to† That’s a forum for black hat hackers, ie hackers with bad intentions. Whether anyone has already accepted ChinaDan’s offer is unknown.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao
The CEO of BinanceChangpeng Zhao said last weekend that a major hack was likely to have taken place earlier this year. Binance’s systems had discovered that the data of ‘1 billion citizens from a country in Asia’ was being sold online. CZ also announced that they have ramped up the verification process for users who may be in the file.
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 an impact on…
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) July 3, 2022
Zhao added that the breach may have been caused by a flawed implementation of ElasticSearch, a popular search and data analysis tool used by enterprises.
Big consequences
The hack could have major consequences for those in the stolen database. For example, hackers, scammers and phishers can actively try to enter crypto wallets on exchanges with the personal data, for example. However you look at it, this hack is a major catastrophe for the people affected by it.
“The stolen data can be used to exploit users and do things like phishing attacks to steal keys or unauthorized access to applications like centralized exchanges.”