Read Alibaba's Role In Shanghai's Recent Infamous Police Database Hack As China Struggles To Censor Breach News

China has rapidly censored news of the alleged hacking of a Shanghai police database, potentially compromising the personal data of more than one billion people, the Financial Times reports. 

An anonymous hacker under the name ChinaDan advertised the data on an online cybercrime forum in late June, claiming the entire file for sale contained multiple terabytes of details, including names, addresses, IDs, phone numbers, and criminal records. He quoted a price of 10 bitcoin, or $200,000, FT wrote.

The hacker acknowledged regaining the stolen information from a private cloud service provided by Alibaba Group Holding Limited BABA.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao acknowledged detecting the hack and assumed that a government developer had inadvertently posted credentials to access the database in an online forum. 

The alleged hack set Chinese social media abuzz for a brief weekend. However, by July 4, the microblogging network Weibo Corp WB and Tencent Holding Ltd's TCEHY WeChat had begun censoring the topic. 

Weibo reportedly blocked hashtags like "data leak" and "Shanghai national security database breach," which had collected millions of views and comments.

One Weibo user with 27,000 followers said censors removed a viral post about the hack, and local authorities invited her to discuss the post. 

FT writes that WeChat appears to have removed the news, including a public post by a well-known cyber security blogger elaborating on the implications of the enormous data breach.  

Chinese search engine Baidu, Inc BIDU displayed fewer results about the topic, with links that it provided to discussions about the hack on Zhihu Inc ZH inaccessible. 

The US and China had been at loggerheads over the safety of the user data of the former country's citizens, which the latter denied.

Cyber hacking has been a crucial dealbreaker that tech companies ranging from Microsoft Corp MSFT to Nvidia Corp NVDA battled as the world moved online due to the pandemic.

Price Action: BABA shares traded lower by 0.36% at $115.58 on the last check Tuesday.

Photo by Fooksou Lamimo via Wikimedia