The latest report about a Chinese data leak incident will certainly catch your attention. Allegedly, an open Chinese database left huge records exposed publicly. But, what’s terrible is that it also reports of ‘breedready’ women in China!
Chinese Data Leak Contained Stats For ‘Breedready’ Women
As disclosed recently, a Chinese database left millions of sensitive records exposed online. Apart from the sensitive personal information of more than 1.8 million women, it also had stats about ‘breedready’ women.
The news first surfaced online from a Dutch researcher’s tweet. While searching for open databases in China, he came across this one. The researcher Victor Gevers belongs to a non-profit group GDI Foundation.
In China, they have a shortage of women. So an organization started to build a database to start registering over 1,8 million women with all kinds of details like phone numbers, addresses, education, location, ID number, marital status, and a ”BreedReady" status? ? pic.twitter.com/fbRKsbNHPJ
— Victor Gevers (@0xDUDE) March 9, 2019
In his following tweets, he shared more details about the data he found. As per his observations, the exposed data included personal details, as well as the information about gender, age, education, and the ‘breedready’ status. The later term probably refers to the women falling into the child-bearing age group. Describing about this detail, he stated,
“The youngest girl in this database is 15y old. The youngest woman with BreedReady:”1″ status is 18y. The average age is a bit above 32y, and the most aged woman with a BR:1 is 39 and with a BR:0 is 95y. All are single [89%], divorced [10%] or widow[1%]. About 82% lives in 北京市.”
Database Went Offline
After the news surfaced online, the exposed database went offline. However, the researcher still hasn’t shared any details about where the database could have belonged. Nonetheless, he said he will keep an eye on it.
“We will keep an eye on that IP address for a while to make sure it doesn’t come back online. We still do not know how the owner was or what the database was actually designed for. When we do we will share this.”
Talking about this report to LHN, Steve Armstrong, Regional Director, UK & Ireland said,
“The likely poor Chinese to English translation which has resulted in the ‘breed-ready’ phrase overlooks the far bigger story here – and that is the number one responsibility of all organisations to defend their data. Leaving individuals’ personal and sensitive information unprotected is both careless and irresponsible.”
He also emphasized on the need for organizations to become vigilant towards cybersecurity.
“The need for comprehensive cybersecurity measures is widely known today; however, many companies continue to display poor stewardship over the personal details belonging to customers, employees, and other parties. Unless organisations begin to respect the importance of protecting customer data, we will continue to see more companies making costly mistakes that have the potential to harm countless individuals.”
Certainly, the cybersecurity team at Swascan also emphasized the same when they discovered Adobe Sandbox vulnerabilities. It’s high time for the firms to maintain close collaboration with cybersecurity experts to ensure protection of their IT infrastructure to the best possible level.
