Slashdot Mirror
Hundreds of Millions of Chinese Chat Logs Leak Online (ft.com)
Hundreds of millions of private chat logs from Chinese users have been left exposed on the internet, a researcher has found, in another worrying case of weak data protection in China. Financial Times reports: Victor Gevers, a security researcher at the cyber-security organisation GDI Foundation, said that he had found a database of 364m records [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.], containing social media profiles and chat logs linked to names and identity card numbers.
The database was freely accessible online to anyone who searched for its IP address, and user profiles were stored together with photographs, addresses and locations, said Mr Gevers. The main database was piping data to 17 other servers depending on which area the data came from, Mr Gevers said. [...] A large number of the records had the names and addresses of web cafes on them. Chinese cyber-security experts have long warned that web cafes collect vast amounts of customer data.
The database was freely accessible online to anyone who searched for its IP address, and user profiles were stored together with photographs, addresses and locations, said Mr Gevers. The main database was piping data to 17 other servers depending on which area the data came from, Mr Gevers said. [...] A large number of the records had the names and addresses of web cafes on them. Chinese cyber-security experts have long warned that web cafes collect vast amounts of customer data.
C'mon. It IS paywalled. Just because you pay to get through the paywall doesn't mean it isn't paywalled. It just means that you have paid to get through the wall.
This is true of every. single. article. you link that is also paywalled.
And Huawei wants the world to believe they'd NEVER collect data for the government. Yeah, sure.
6 billion people can't read it, it's in Chinese.
You are worrying about "weak data protection" but not about fact that data is collected!? Stop collecting then you will not have to worry!
They don't believe in privacy or human rights, why should this matter? Don't chinese assume the government reads everything they say?
In a country known to monitor as much as possible about their citizens, it can be reasonable to expect chats are monitored.
If you expect chats are monitored, is there any longer an expectation of privacy?
If there is no expectation of privacy, are release of chat logs really a breach, or even surprising?
IOW, if you happened to know the IP address you could use it to contact the database. No need to "go search for it", just feed it to the right database software.
So that sentence really doesn't tell you anything other than "unsecured database connected to the 'net", and so we're back to the usual case where "security researchers" tell you diddly squat but do their level best to scare you with as little actual information as possible. (And msmash lapping it up as if it was Reallly Important News.)
But let's be real now. This is not a problem, since these are Chinese chatlogs. That means they've been vetted by the government and were not deleted. Therefore they're not objectionable, and so their leaking cannot be a problem. Right?
A million lines of, "Oh Wei, I love you long time!"
Table-ized A.I.
... not a single one of those people should be concerned, unless of course he or she has broken the law!
It is most likely that this system is only for tracking gamers as most of the sample dialogs appears to be about this subject.
Can someone, maybe from China, come up with a good explanation why they seem to have such a particular interest in gamers?
Are there any subtitles?