July 6, 2022
image source,EPA
Recently, a message about “hackers peddling the personal information of one billion people in Shanghai police” has been rampant, and the Chinese government’s usual practice of keeping silent has made the rumor even more indistinguishable.
At the same time, some international mainstream media’s follow-up reports on this rumor and the information obtained by trying to directly contact the individuals whose information has been leaked have increased the credibility of this rumor to a certain extent.
Some analysts pointed out that if this rumor can finally be confirmed, it will be the world’s largest data leak in history. Some professionals have even begun to study China from the leaked data, hoping to reveal the true face of China that the outside world has never had the opportunity to spy on.
How to buy and sell data?
According to Reuters, a hacker or organization under the online name “ChinaDan” posted on the hacker “Breach Forums” on June 30, “In 2022, the database of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau will be leaked. This database contains trillions of characters. terabytes (TB) of data and billions of pieces of information about Chinese citizens.”
“The database contains information on one billion Chinese citizens and billions of case files, including names, addresses, places of birth, ID numbers, mobile phone numbers, all crime/case details,” the post added.
In order to prove the reliability of his information, the poster also released a sample of 750,000 records and asked for 10 bitcoins (about 200,000 US dollars / 1.34 million yuan), but did not elaborate on how the data was obtained.
Due to the inability to verify the authenticity of the post, many media tried to contact the poster, but failed; however, some media tried to contact the individuals from the published samples, with a certain degree of success rate.
What do the international media say?
The US “Wall Street Journal” said that the data samples of 750,000 records released by hackers contained individuals’ names, ID numbers, phone numbers, birthdays and places of birth, as well as detailed police information. Among them, there are cases of petty theft, Internet fraud, etc., as well as domestic violence police records. The earliest cases can be traced back to 1995, and the latest is 2019.
The US “New York Times” believes that the database provided by the hackers of the Shanghai police highlights the two sides of China: Although China is far ahead of the world in collecting a large amount of citizen information, it is not so successful in protecting the security of this data.
The Financial Times noted that China is rapidly censoring news that the Shanghai police database has been hacked. The hack caused a brief uproar on Chinese social media over the weekend, but “by Monday, Weibo and Tencent’s WeChat had begun censoring the topic,” the report said.
Bloomberg said it sent faxes to both the Shanghai police and the network management authority to inquire about the matter, but received no response.
Search the Internet for keywords such as “Billion Data Leakage”, “One Billion Personal Information”, and you can find links to relevant reports published by some Chinese media, but these links have all expired.
Spy on China Window
Although Chinese officials have so far not responded to the news that hackers are selling the personal information of one billion people in China, many scholars have compared the information they have seen with previous research results.
Yi Fuxian, the author of the book “Empty Nest of Great Powers” who has been concerned about China’s population issues for many years, commented on the leaked data on his Twitter that this set of data has enormous economic value, “China’s population crisis may exceed everyone’s. imagination”.
And as rumors continue to ferment overseas, some questions that may never be answered are also raised: Are these data credible? If it was the data that the Shanghai Public Security Bureau really had, how was it leaked? Was it stolen by hackers or human security negligence? Who is this data in the hands of now? How will the data breach affect individual Chinese citizens? What about China as a whole?
If the data is fabricated and not credible, then what is the purpose of this leak?
