Binance Says Some Users Potentially Hit By China’s Biggest Data Breach

Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao claims that their threat intelligence has identified the sale of the personal information of over 1 billion people on the dark web.

CZ said the leaked details contain details like names, national identity, address, police, and medical records, and are from an Asian country. Other reports suggest the details are those of Chinese citizens. 

Binance has increased its security verification to protect the potentially affected users, CZ said. 

Massive Data Leak From China

In an anonymous post on an online forum, a person or group by the member name ChinaDan claimed that the Shanghai National Police database was hacked. The hacker claimed to possess 23 TeraBytes worth of information on a billion Chinese citizens, as pointed out by the Binance CEO. The sheer amount of data makes this breach the largest ever in China.

The hacker has asked for a price of 10 Bitcoins, currently worth over 191,000 USD. According to many, the asking price is very low compared to its worth.

Despite the Shanghai Police or Chinese cybercrime authorities not commenting on the matter, the hacker has revealed bits of information to gain credibility. The hacker revealed three different datasets, containing 750,000 files from the database. The first set is likely a collection of delivery locations while the second appears to be police call records. On the other hand, the third dataset contains information like addresses, heights, and gender.

Binance Affirms Threat Credibility

Binance CEO CZ claimed that its threat intelligence detected the sale on the dark web. Moreover, he claims that the breach was due to a bug in the elastic search deployed by a government agency. 

Earlier this year, Binance became the first cryptocurrency company to be a part of the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance. The NCFTA claims to have prevented the loss of over $2 bln. Earlier Binance had played a key role in the takedown of FancyCat, a malicious group that was responsible for laundering over half a billion dollars in ransomware. 

Binance’s CEO reveals that they have increased their security verification to protect all users potentially affected by the breach.