A hacker claimed to have obtained personal information from Shanghai police on a billion Chinese people, which tech experts say, if true, would be one of the biggest data breaches in history. The anonymous netizen, identified as “ChinaDan”, posted on the hacking forum Breach Forums last week offering to sell more than 23 terabytes (TB) of data for 10 bitcoins, the equivalent of US$ 200 thousand (about R$ 1 million). - TikTok removes 20 million accounts on suspicion of being under 13 “In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains many TB of data and information about billions of Chinese citizens,” the post said. “The databases contain information about 1 billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records including: name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, all crime/case details.” Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the post and was unable to contact ChinaDan. The Shanghai government and police department did not comment on the case. The post was widely discussed on Chinese social media platforms Weibo and WeChat over the weekend. Users said they were worried and the hashtag “data leak” was even blocked on Weibo on Sunday afternoon (3). Kendra Schaefer, head of technology policy research at Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China, said in a Twitter post that it was “difficult to parse the truth from hearsay.” If the material the hacker claimed came from the Ministry of Public Security, it would be bad for “various reasons,” Schaefer said. “Obviously it would be one of the biggest and worst violations in history,” she said. Zhao Changpeng, CEO of Binance, claimed that the cryptocurrency exchange stepped up user verification processes after threat intelligence detected the sale of records belonging to 1 billion residents of an Asian country on the dark web. He also said on Twitter that a leak could have been due to “a bug in an Elastic Search deployment by a (government) agency”, without saying if he was referring to the Shanghai police case. The allegation of a hack comes as China has pledged to improve privacy protection of online users’ data, instructing its tech giants to ensure safer storage following public complaints about mismanagement and misuse. Last year, China passed new laws governing how personal information and data generated within its borders must be handled.