Over 30M of school records in Vietnam gets sold by a hacker

July 14, 2022
30M School Records Vietnam Dark Web Sold Marketplace Hacker meli0das PII

A new investigation on the dark web revealed a new data breach incident in Vietnam that compromised over 30 million personally identifiable information (PII) of individuals in one of the country’s most popular schools.

The unknown hacker, who called themselves meli0das, had posted the Vietnamese school’s data sale on an underground forum. Moreover, the massive amount of data the hacker trades are sold for about $3,500.

 

From the advertisement post, the hacker boasted that the 30 million compromised databases are about one-third of the entire population in Vietnam.

 

Researchers found that the meli0das hacker had only joined the underground forum in June of this year. After posting the Vietnamese school’s data for sale, they added that the $3,500 payment must be in Monero, a cryptocurrency with technology to enhance transactions’ anonymity and privacy.

The compromised records from the affected school in Vietnam include full names, email addresses, contact details, birthdates, students’ grades, school, and location. The threat actor also said that the data they hold has never been leaked.

To prove their claims, meli0das published some samples of the data, which security researchers verified to be accurate. However, the researchers said that the scale of the entire leak could not be identified.

An attempt to reach out to the hacker was also made, but the security experts said that meli0das was cautious as they only provided samples of data to trusted accounts or those that had proved to have sufficient money to buy the school’s database.

Furthermore, aside from the 30 million worth of data, the hacker offered another data set of 360,000 students in Vietnam hacked from another educational site. Despite researchers verifying the hack’s occurrence, they seemed unsure about its scale.

The security experts also stated that if the scale of the alleged hack is proved true, it could be one of the biggest breach incidents in Vietnam. In related news, another hacker sold massive amounts of data stolen from Chinese citizens on the dark web, which is claimed to be the largest data breach in the country.

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