China Police Database Was Left Open Online for Over a Year, Enabling Leak

What is probably going certainly one of historical past’s largest heists of private information—and the largest known cybersecurity breach in China—occurred due to a frequent vulnerability that left the data open for the taking on the web, say cybersecurity specialists who found the safety flaw earlier this 12 months.

The Shanghai police data—containing the names, authorities ID numbers, telephone numbers and incident studies of nearly 1 billion Chinese citizens—have been saved securely, in keeping with the cybersecurity specialists. But a dashboard for managing and accessing the information was arrange on a public internet tackle and left open with out a password, which allowed anybody with comparatively fundamental technical information to waltz in and replica or steal the trove of data, they mentioned.