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- Hundreds of millions of users are likely exposed.
- Data leak contained billions of documents with financial data, WeChat and Alipay details.
- The Cybernews research team believes the dataset was meticulously gathered and maintained for building comprehensive behavioral, economic, and social profiles of nearly any Chinese citizen.
The supermassive data leak likely exposed hundreds of millions of users, primarily from China, the Cybernews research team’s latest findings reveal. A humungous, 631 gigabytes-strong database was left without a password, publicizing mind-boggling 4 billion records.
Bob Dyachenko, cybersecurity researcher and owner at SecurityDiscovery.com, together with the Cybernews team, discovered billions upon billions of exposed records on an open instance.
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The database consisted of numerous collections, containing from half a million to over 800 million records from various sources. The Cybernews research team believes the dataset was meticulously gathered and maintained for building comprehensive behavioral, economic, and social profiles of nearly any Chinese citizen.
“The sheer volume and diversity of data types in this leak suggests that this was likely a centralized aggregation point, potentially maintained for surveillance, profiling, or data enrichment purposes,” the team observed.
There’s no shortage of ways threat actors or nation states could exploit the data. With a data set of that magnitude, everything from large-scale phishing, blackmail, and fraud to state-sponsored intelligence gathering and disinformation campaigns is on the table.
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The team managed to see sixteen data collections, likely named after the type of data they included.
The largest collection, with over 805 million records, was named “wechatid_db,” which most likely points to the data coming from the Baidu-owned super-app WeChat.
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The second largest collection, “address_db,” had over 780 million records containing residential data with geographic identifiers. The third largest collection, simply named “bank,” had over 630 million records of financial data, including payment card numbers, dates of birth, names, and phone numbers.
Possessing only these three collections would enable skilled attackers to correlate different data points to find out where certain users live and what their spending habits, debts, and savings are.
Another major collection in the dataset was named in Mandarin, which roughly translates to “three-factor checks.” With over 610 million records, the collection most likely contained IDs, phone numbers, and usernames.
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"Individuals who may be affected by this leak have no direct recourse due to the anonymity of the owner and lack of notification channels,” the team noted.
China-based data leaks are hardly new. We [Cybernews] ourselves have previously written about a data leak that exposed 1.5 billion Weibo, DiDi, Shanghai Communist Party, and others’ records, or a mysterious actor spilling over 1.2 billion records on Chinese users. More recently, attackers leaked 62 million iPhone users’ records online.
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