If the leak indeed contains records on 1 billion people, 70% of China’s population could be exposed. Victims of the breach “have to assume forever available to anyone and they should be taking precautions to protect themselves,” Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist at cybersecurity firm Sophos, told the Associated Press. Note the use of '外网' in the comments, which I translated as 'the Internet outside of China.' /BWQ81t5bx7- William Farris July 5, 2022 These screenshots show how Sina Weibo censored a post relating to the large data leak of personal information of people in the PRC. (Elastic, a software firm that Zhao references in his tweet, told Fortune that the firm was not involved in the data breach.) He later said that the hack had likely occurred because a government developer inadvertently published login credentials to the database on a tech blog. Nine people whose names were listed in the database told the Wall Street Journal that the corresponding personal information was correct.Ĭhangpeng Zhao, CEO of crypto exchange Binance, rang early alarm bells about the hack on on July 4, and said that Binance had stepped up its security measures in response to the leaked data. CNN confirmed the veracity of two dozen of those entries. The hacker posted a portion of the database in the advertisement on the forum with 750,000 data entries. The hacker said that he or she had hacked Shanghai police records and collected the names, addresses, mobile numbers, national ID numbers, ages, and birthplaces of 1 billion people. News of the data leak started trickling out last Thursday after an anonymous user in a hacker forum attempted to sell the entire database for 10 Bitcoin, equivalent to $202,000.

Wechat hackers