Data theft – Singaporean job-seekers may be the next target

With the over 200 million resumes of Chinese nationals hacked and unofficially exposed online, there is strong possibility that Singaporean job seekers and professionals’ identity and private information will likewise be targeted by hackers considering the close ties that Singapore has with China.

Such speculation emerges as a database containing CVs of more than 200 million Chinese people have been found unofficially exposed online.

Security firm Hackenproof said that names, mobile phone numbers, email addresses, education histories and many other personal details were included in the data trove.

Analysts hinted that the information was built up by “scraping” several Chinese job sites.

Although more than 17,000 Singaporeans have found jobs through the government’s career placement scheme in the first half of 2018, there still remains about two-thirds of job seekers left unemployed and they could be the next mark if security measures are not properly put in place in Singapore’s employment data coffers.

Expressed through a blog site, Hackenproof Research Director Bob Diachenko was quoted as saying that he initially thought the data had been taken from the huge, confidential advert site BJ.58.com.
However, BJ.58.com refuted such notion. In a statement, , BJ.58.com asserted that they have searched all over their database and investigated all the other storage units, and that it turned out that the sample data is not leaked from them. It appears that the data was leaked from a third party who scraped data from many CV websites, the group added.

Immediately after Mr. Diachenko publicized the existence of the data collection via Twitter, it was removed from the Amazon cloud server where it had been stored. Later investigation implied that these have been copied at least 12 times before being deleted.

The data loss is the latest in a series of unauthorized information exposures about Chinese people.

A 2018 report  from the Internet Society of China revealed that approximately 19% of Chinese net users had social media and other accounts being hacked or their passwords lost.

With this current mayhem about identity theft happening to China’s citizens, Singaporeans need to be extra vigilant and being alert is imperative.