PETALING JAYA: A Chinese company with ties to Beijing’s military and intelligence networks has amassed a vast database of detailed personal information on 2.4 million people, including 1,400 Malaysians.
According to a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the database has been leaked from the Shenzhen company Zhenhua Data, which is believed to be used by China’s intelligence service.
The leak raises further questions about the spread and scope of China’s intelligence-gathering operations as Zhenhua has the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party among its main clients.
The database was leaked to a US academic based in Vietnam, Chris Balding, who until 2018 had worked at Peking University before leaving China citing fears for his physical safety.
Of the 250,000 records recovered by a Canberra cybersecurity company, there are 1,400 Malaysians, 2,100 Indonesians, 52,000 Americans, 35,000 Australians, 10,000 Indians, 9,700 Britons, 5,000 Canadians and 138 from Papua New Guinea.
“China is absolutely building a massive surveillance state both domestically and internationally,” Balding told ABC.
The information collected includes date of birth, address and marital status, along with photographs, political associations, relatives and social media IDs, much of which was sourced from social media.
While most of the information was taken from public material, some profiles contained information which appeared to have been sourced from confidential bank records, job applications and psychological profiles, likely obtained on the dark web.
This data dump suggests a complex global operation using artificial intelligence to trawl publicly available data to create detailed profiles of individuals and organisations, potentially probing for compromise opportunities.
Zhenhua boasts of about 20 “collection nodes” scattered around the world, two of which have been identified as being in Kansas, US and the South Korean capital Seoul.