Hundreds Of Millions Of Chinese Citizens' Data Stolen, Claims Hacker

Tuesday, 5 July 2022Newsdesk

A hacker claiming to have stolen personal data from hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens is now selling the information online. A sample of 750,000 entries posted online by the hacker showed citizens' names, mobile phone numbers, national ID numbers, addresses, birthdays and police reports they had filed.

New Delhi, 05 July 2022

As per news report of NDTV, AFP and cybersecurity experts have verified some of the citizen data in the sample as authentic, but the scope of the entire database is hard to determine. Advertised on a forum late last month but only picked up by cybersecurity experts this week, the 23-terabyte database -- which the hacker claims contains the records of a billion Chinese citizens -- is being sold for 10 bitcoin (approximately $200,000). "It looks like it's from multiple sources. Some are facial recognition systems, others appear to be census data," said Robert Potter, co-founder of cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0. "There is no verification of the total number of records and I'm sceptical of the one billion citizens number," he added.

Source -NDTV