One thing you should note is the fact that China does not have services such as Facebook or Google because their government has blocked them from a long time now. The Chinese government calls it the Great Chinese firewall and many companies are not even thinking about entering China due to these reasons. However, we know that the Chinese users are not short of anything because they have local companies who have built some alternate platforms for their people to use.
One of those platforms is Weibo which is similar to Facebook and Twitter in a way that all the Chinese users can post, comment, like, share and follow people that they like. Also, Weibo is open to everyone outside of China which means you can make an account there to interact with people from China. However, a new report has emerged which is pretty concerning for Weibo users. It is known that 538 million Weibo users have their data leaked and sold to Dark Web customers.
Now, this includes some sensitive information such as phone numbers as well. Also, the data includes personal information of these users such as photos, age, birthdate etc. This is known to us via ZDNet who claims to have seen ads on the Dark Web which claim to have possession of such data.
According to the poster of this ad who is believed to be the hacker themselves, they claim to have breached Weibo in mid-2019 which is when their database was accessed and all this data was gathered by them. As per the ad copy, this database had information such as ” real names, site usernames, gender, location, and — for 172 million users — phone numbers” which is now available to them.
It is known that passwords were not included in this data and it is being sold for just $250. Therefore, your accounts on Weibo are secure but your data is not.
