Someone behind the Great Firewall was enthusiastic enough to brag about his tremendous creativity while working for Shanghai Police and posted some scripts online to prove it.

Pity the scripts contained a hardcoded access key.

Now the stuff that was available at the database instances accessible with the credentials are now up for sale on the dark web. The asking price for the database, is just 10 bitcoins (a bit north of $202,000) and contains records of people across China with names, identification and mobile phone numbers, the original source of the data, and a reference to the first time the details were entered into the database and stuff like express delivery and food-order details. This could imply that this data were compiled by a secret police from multiple sources across the country, beyond what normal law enforcement typically gathers.

These are good news and bad news. Good, because no credit card numbers and such data is present.

And bad, for a number of reasons. Like a police force keeping track of your food deliveries and whatnot and also that a police force keeping these data unecrypted and on a server cluster running on default settings.

Of course, this ain’t no first nor a last of these.