(ANSA) - MILAN, 05 JUL - The potential victims of yet another theft of sensitive data by hackers would be 1 billion.
As Bloomberg reports, in recent months a single user or a team still not well specified, would have violated the database of the Shanghai police, gaining access to the personal information of 1 billion Chinese.
According to the source, the huge archive, of 23 terabytes of data, was put up for sale on the dark web for 10 bitcoins, over 198,000 dollars.
Following the event, the hashtag "Shanghaidata leak" spread on Twitter.
The data includes names, addresses, places of birth, identification numbers of the identity cards and mobile phones of the victims.
The Wall Street Journal has acquired a portion of the archive, partially verifying its correctness through the
cross-referencing of public information about crimes in which the Shanghai police have been interested since 1995. It is not yet clear how the hacker infiltrated the police database, but the first investigations refer to an access obtained through a cloudcomputing company of the Alibaba group , called Aliyun, on whose server the archive was hosted.
Alibaba itself is investigating the matter.
If confirmed, it would be the most serious in China's history.
The country has seen an escalation of security incidents in recent years.
In 2016, sensitive information about Chinese managers and entrepreneurs was posted on Twitter, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma.
had admitted data theft of more than 538 million users while in 2022, the Chinese police servers in the Xinjiang region had been hacked to extract evidence of the Chinese government's abuses on the Uighur ethnic minority.
(HANDLE).