Incidents in country:
15 incidents catalogued
A dataset dubbed FortiBleed exposed valid Fortinet FortiGate VPN credentials — including plaintext passwords — for 73,932 firewall URLs across 194 countries, the product of a Russian-speaking crew that reused passwords from earlier breaches and infostealer logs rather than any new Fortinet vulnerability.
The University of Nottingham confirmed a cyber incident after the ShinyHunters extortion group claimed to have stolen around 40 GB of data from its student-records system, exposing roughly 455,000 email addresses along with names, passport numbers, and fee-payment details.
A cyberattack on Britain's biggest carmaker forced JLR to shut down its global IT network and halted vehicle production in the UK, China, Slovakia, India, and Brazil for five weeks — now considered the most economically damaging cyber incident in UK history.
LockBit ransomware disrupted the U.S. broker-dealer arm of the world's largest bank, ICBC, jamming settlement of over $9 billion in U.S. Treasury trades. Bank staff sent critical settlement details by USB stick via a messenger across Manhattan. $62 billion of Treasuries failed to deliver in one day.
China-based Storm-0558 forged authentication tokens using a stolen Microsoft consumer signing key and read email at approximately 25 organisations — including the US State Department, the Department of Commerce, and the U.S. Ambassador to China. The 'cascade of errors' that enabled it became a defining case for cloud-provider key custody.
China's cyberspace regulator fined ride-hailing giant Didi Global RMB 8.026 billion (about $1.2 billion) after a year-long review found 16 violations of the Cybersecurity Law, Data Security Law and Personal Information Protection Law, including the illegal collection of facial-recognition, location and clipboard data from hundreds of millions of riders and drivers.
An exposed Shanghai Public Security Bureau database left a hacker known as 'ChinaDan' offering 23 terabytes of data on roughly 1 billion Chinese residents — names, national ID numbers, phone numbers, addresses and police case records — for 10 bitcoin, in what is widely regarded as the largest government data breach in Chinese history.
Personal data on 538 million Sina Weibo accounts — including the phone numbers of 172 million users — was offered for sale on the dark web for about $250, in a leak Weibo attributed to address-book matching abuse dating back to 2018. China's industry ministry summoned the company over its handling of personal data.
A ransomware attack paralysed weaving-machine manufacturer Picanol's plants in Ieper (Belgium), Romania, and China, halting production for ~2,300 employees for over a week. Trading in Picanol shares was suspended during the disruption.
A North Korean ransomware worm that exploited the EternalBlue SMB vulnerability to spread to ~200,000 systems across 150 countries in 24 hours. Paralysed the U.K.'s NHS and crippled manufacturing globally.
In late 2016, China's leading online video platform Youku suffered a data breach exposing roughly 92 million unique user accounts together with usernames and MD5-hashed passwords, which later circulated on dark-web marketplaces.
In October 2015, a dataset attributed to the Chinese email provider NetEase (163.com and 126.com) surfaced, allegedly exposing around 234 million email addresses and plaintext passwords. NetEase denied any breach; HIBP lists the incident as unverified.
In 2013 (exact date unknown), the Chinese e-commerce service JD suffered a data breach that exposed 13GB of data containing 77 million unique email addresses. The data also included usernames, phone numbers and passwords stored as SHA-1 hashes.
In August 2012, the Xiaomi user forum website suffered a data breach. In all, 7 million email addresses appeared in the breach although a significant portion of them were numeric aliases on the bbs_ml_as_uid.xiaomi.com domain.
In December 2011, China's largest online forum known as Tianya was hacked and tens of millions of accounts were obtained by the attacker. The leaked data included names, usernames and email addresses.