Researchers have discovered a 631GB database – which contained records on around four billion Chinese citizens – was left exposed on the internet.
Bob Dyachenko, owner of Security Discovery, and the team at Cybernews, found the trove of personal information, which they believe was gathered and maintained to build comprehensive behavioural, economic and social profiles on Chinese citizens.
The database held several collections of information, ranging from half a million to more than 800 million records from various sources. The team managed to view 16 collections before the exposed database was taken down, which also stopped them from finding the identity of the owner.
The 16 collections viewed were “likely” named for the type of data they included. For example, the largest collection – of 805 million records – was named “wechatid_db” and was most likely pulled from Tencent-owned super app WeChat.