Unidentified individuals have put up for sale a database that allegedly contains information on one billion Chinese citizens for 10 BTC (over $190,000 at the time of writing).

The sale message appeared on the Breach Forums. The seller claims that the data came from a leak by the Shanghai Police.

The database contains information on Chinese citizens’ names, addresses, places of birth, documents, phone numbers and case files. The Violation Forums blocked the message about the sale.

Several users noted that the published data is up to date. If the leak is fully confirmed, it will be one of the largest in the country’s history.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance exchange, said the company discovered the sale of data on the dark web about billions of residents of “an Asian country”. He suggested that the incident occurred due to an error in the distribution of Elastic Search by an unnamed government agency.

Our threat intelligence has identified 1 billion resident records for sale on the dark web, including name, address, national identity, cell phone, police and medical records from an Asian country. Most likely due to a bug in the distribution of Elastic Search by a government agency. The effect on this…

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) Jul 3, 2022

Zhao added that Binance has stepped up verification measures for potentially affected users.

Citing cybersecurity experts, Bloomberg writes that hackers can access Shanghai police data through a “third-party cloud infrastructure partner.”

Previously unknown hackers hacked the police databases of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China and gained access to thousands of photos of persecuted Uyghurs. Xinjiang’s “reeducation camps” are said to hold nearly a million detainees, mostly Uighurs, detained without trial.

In June, non-tradable token platform OpenSea reported that user data had been leaked.

Read ForkLog bitcoin news in our Telegram – cryptocurrency news, courses and analysis.