When you try to control the Internet, the Internet sometimes bites back. The Chinese government suffered a large data breach, as the personal information of Chinese Communist Party officials, and several industry leaders, were exposed and posted to Twitter.

While the account that posted the data has been frozen, a vast amount of information was still leaked in the time it was up. According to Bloomberg, This includes official ID cards, residential addresses, and even occasionally information about the victims’ children, targeted at officials in government, banking, technology, and industry.

The businesses targeted by the hacker include Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd., and Sany Heavy Industry Co. As for government officials, the report says that “the governor of a major province” was a victim, but no further details were provided.

The hacker responsible tweeted that the intention was to demonstrate how sensitive information could be obtained through black-market channels, saying: “I hope this encourages the nation’s scrutiny, and shows how worthless individual data is in China.” If that was indeed the purpose, it seems to have succeeded, and in doing so made the information even easier to obtain.

The Twitter account the information was posted on has been shut down, and the tweets deleted, although now that it’s been posted to the Internet, it’s there forever, lurking somewhere on someone’s server. Twitter is not typically accessible from China, except through a virtual private network, while leaking private information is a violation of both Twitter’s terms of services and Chinese law.

While the identity of the hacker is unknown, the account goes by the name “shenfenzheng,” which translates to “personal ID.” The hacker’s means of gathering the information is unknown, but according to shenfenzheng, was as easy “as buying cabbage.”

Photo by DeeMakMak