Unknown hackers claimed to have stolen data on as many as a billion Chinese residents.
The hackers accessed the data after breaching a Shanghai police database.
The person or group claiming the attack has offered to sell more than 23 terabytes of stolen data from the database, including names, addresses, birthplaces, national IDs, phone numbers and criminal case information, Bloomberg reports.
The unidentified hacker was asking for 10 bitcoin, worth around $200,000.
Zhao Changpeng, founder and Chief Executive Officer of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, tweeted on Monday the company had detected the breach of a billion resident records “from one Asian country,” without specifying which.
Binance had since increased verification procedures for potentially affected users.
Under Chinese law, the exposure of personal information can result in jail terms.
It’s unclear how the alleged cyberattackers in this breach gained access to Shanghai police servers.
One popular theory circulated online among cybersecurity experts was that the breach involved a third-party cloud infrastructure partner.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Huawei Technologies Co. are among the country’s biggest external cloud services.
