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China: Shanghai Landmark
SHANGHAI (77WABC) — A hacker claimed to have stolen one billion Chinese residents’ records from Shanghai police in what would rank as possibly the biggest data breach in the country’s history.
According to Fox Business, a post on the hacker hot-spot Breach Forums listed the information “on one billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records” for sale to the sum of 10 Bitcoin, or roughly $200,000. The poster — who used the name ChinaDan — said the trove of information included “name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, all crime/case details.”
The post remains unverified, but it has drawn immense interest within China and abroad: Users on China’s Weibo and WeChat platforms expressed great concern and distress about the truth of the claim. One reason the breach may have contained so much information is that the Shanghai police would have access to a national data-sharing system, providing access to more information than a regional police authority would otherwise have.
