Zhenhua Data leak: Personal details of 2.4 M gathered by Chinese tech company

Nithin Chowdary

September 14, 2020

A Chinese tech company that has links to the country's military and intelligence networks collected personal details of millions of people worldwide. The database includes about 2.4 million people, mostly scraped from public open-source data such as social media profiles. Zhenhua Data, based in Shenzhen, compiled it.A cybersecurity consultancy based in Canberra, Internet 2.0, stated that they could recover the records of around 250,000 people from the leaked dataset, including 52,000 Americans, 35,000 Australians, and nearly 10,000 Britons. They include politicians, their relatives, the royal family, celebrities, military figures. The database also reportedly includes 793 New Zealanders profiles. Zhenhua representative, surnamed Sun, stated that the report is untrue and that their data are all public data on the internet and do not collect data. She also said that there is no database of 2 million people and denied any links with the Chinese government and military. She stated that it is research, and there are many overseas platforms like this. The databases, collectively called the Overseas Key Information Database (OKIDB), was leaked to an American academic who shared the data with Internet 2.0, an Australian based cybersecurity consultancy. Christopher Balding, who was previously worked in Shenzhen but has returned to the US because of security concerns, said the information targeted influential individuals and institutions.

Abridged fromCybersafe News