A few days ago, hackers claimed to have successfully stolen 23TB of data from a Shanghai police database containing information on one billion Chinese citizens. According to Bloomberg , hackers are currently trying to sell all the information for 10 bitcoins, and the stolen data contains sensitive content such as names, addresses, places of birth, ID numbers and mobile phone numbers. After the incident , reporters from The Wall Street Journal verified a small sample of data disclosed by hackers, and the result was to verify the reporting records dating back to 1995.

The Shanghai police have so far made no comment on the data breach, and it is difficult to determine how the hackers accomplished the intrusion. There are rumors that the problem lies with Alibaba Cloud, where the data is stored, and Alibaba has said it will investigate. If all is true, this would be the largest data breach in Chinese history.