Surveillance data of Chinese citizens put online by hackers

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All these days, we have seen countries and governments screeching about cyber attacks and data thefts conducted by Chinese hackers. But now, a hacker online has claimed that he/she is ready to sell about 23 terabytes of data for 10 bitcoins or $246,000 appx.

The hacker named ‘ChinaDan’ also notified those interested that the information was related to 1 billion Chinese populace and was stolen from a police database of Shanghai National Police during the recent covid pandemic propelled lockdown months.

Since 2016, China has been conducting surveillance on its populace in different parts of the country. The aim behind the surveillance is to identify crime at its root level and nip it out before it is too late.

In April this year, a Chinese media resource claimed that the monitoring of the populace has curbed crime by 53% and cited the recent Texas school shooting crime as an example and said that the Xi Jinping-led nation doesn’t have this menace at all, as it neutralizes criminal thoughts in citizens’ mind before they can happen in real-time.

ChinaDan is said to access information such as names, addresses, birthplace, national identity numbers, mobile numbers, and criminal cases against the populace.

The Shanghai Government and the Police department are silent on this media report that was first published in Reuters a few hours ago

Currently, some of the siphoned details are posted online and are being promoted on China’s Weibo and WeChat platforms

An ethical hacker who is super active on Twitter claimed the information to be true and suspected that the details could have been spilled to hackers because of a misconfiguration vulnerability in the Elastic Search Deployment server of the government agency.

More details are awaited!

 

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Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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