As people might know that just 3 months back in March 2020 the Chinese site Sina Weibo had faced a data breach exposing over 500 million Weibo user records on darkweb. Typically, these leaked records included personal details of users such as their real names, site usernames, gender, location, and — for 172 million users — phone numbers.
Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblogging (weibo) website. Launched by Sina Corporation on 14 August 2009, it has been one of the biggest social media platforms in China, with over 445 million monthly active users as of Q3 2018. The platform has been a huge financial success, with surging stocks, lucrative advertising sales, and high revenue and total earnings per quarter. At the start of 2018, it surpassed the US$30 billion market valuation mark for the first time.In March 2014, Sina Corporation announced a spinoff of Weibo as a separate entity and filed an IPO under the symbol WB. Sina carved out 11% of Weibo in the IPO, with Alibaba owning 32% post-IPO. The company began trading publicly on 17 April 2014. In March 2017, Sina launched Sina Weibo International Version. This new version has a clear, concise user interface design, as well as an ad-free feature; while its volume is very small, only occupying one-fifth of the space of the original, it still performs all of the original’s functions. In June 2018, Sina Weibo reached 413 million active users. In November 2018, Sina Weibo suspended its registration function for minors under the age of 14. In July 2019, Sina Weibo announced that it would launch a two-month campaign to clean up pornographic and vulgar information, named The Blue Plan.
Recently, as part of our regular deep web and darkweb sweeps the Cyble Research Team identified a credible actor in one of the darkweb markets who was selling the full database of Sina Weibo. Cyble has acquired the full database that includes 500 million records for just $500. In a couple of hours, the whole database containing personal details of Weibo users would be indexed on amibreached.com. Upon further analysis, our researchers looked into the various fields of the database, whose snapshot is shown below.
About Cyble:
Cyble is a US-based cyber threat intelligence company with the express mission to provide organizations with real-time views of their supply chain cyber threats and risks.