Security News > 2022 > July > Human Error Blamed for Leak of 1 Billion Records of Chinese Citizens
A prominent Chinese tech CEO has cited human error as the likely reason hackers got their hands on the personal data of 1 billion people in China from a Shanghai police database and then put some of it up for sale on illicit online markets.
An annual report on data breaches by Verizon-the 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report-cited the "Human element" as responsible for 82 percent of the breaches analyzed by researchers, with 13 percent directly attributed to human error.
Another security expert advised organizations to establish a layered defense and behavior detection model to prevent human error from causing potentially catastrophic data leaks.
In a country with a government that notoriously collects mountains of data about its own citizens while imposing tight restrictions on what data and internet resources they themselves can access and use, it's not surprising that some of this data would eventually fall into criminals' hands.
There already is precedence for high-profile data leaks that expose the personal data of Chinese citizens.
In 2020, for example, sensitive data of around 2 million members of the Communist Party of China were leaked, including official records as well as info related to their activity in global organizations.