A hacker is selling an alleged 1 billion Chinese citizens’ information stolen from Shanghai police. @rachelliang5602 & I downloaded the sample the hacker provided and called dozens of people listed. Nine picked up & confirmed exactly what the data said.
The sample contains individuals’ personal names, national ID numbers, phone numbers, birthdays and birthplaces, as well as detailed summaries of crimes and incidents they had reported to the police.
The cases range from incidents of petty theft and cyber fraud to reports of domestic violence, dating as far back as 1995 to as recently as 2019.
At this point, it’s impossible to confirm the scale of the data leak, but five of the people who picked up verified all of the case details listed with their name — information that would would be difficult to obtain from any source other than the police.
The other four confirmed basic information like their names before hanging up.
One man, upon hearing why we had his information, sighed in resignation: “We are all running naked,” he said, using popular Chinese slang for a lack of privacy.
If the hack indeed encompasses 1 billion people, it would be one of *largest* cybersecurity breaches ever recorded and the largest known for China.
But experts remain cautious—the hacker’s claim could be exaggerated or falsified to boost financial gain.
I was truly stunned when the first person picked up—I really believed the whole thing to be fake. By the third, I was shaking—both from the nerves of trying to explain why I had their extremely private information and the weight of realizing what this leak could mean for so many.
There’s no way really to predict the consequences other than that the people affected will have to live with it pretty much forever.
As @troyhunt told me: “Trying to remove your information from the internet is like trying to remove pee from a pool.”