Intelligence

Exposed MongoDB revealed facial recognition abuse for tracking the Uyghur Muslim minority in China.

Security expert discovered an exposed MongoDB that reveals facial recognition abuse for tracking the Uyghur Muslim minority in China.Exposed MongoDB revealed facial recognition abuse for tracking the Uyghur Muslim minority in China.

We have debated for a long time the surveillance campaigns conducted by the Chinese government, now the news of the day is the discovery of a misconfigured database containing data from facial recognition allegedly carried out by China.

The database was discovered by the popular Dutch security researcher
Victor Gevers, it contained details about surveillance activities conducted by the Chinese government and that was aimed at tracking people of the Uyghur Muslim minority in China.

The archive is a MongoDB operated by the Chinese firm SenseNets that also provides facial recognition solutions.

The government of Beijing Chinese is utilizing facial recognition databases for months to monitor Uyghur people in the Xinjiang region.

According to Gevers, the exposed archive contains data of about 2,565,724 users, including names, ID card numbers, sex, nationality, ID card’s issue and expiration dates, home addresses, photographs, date-of-birth, and employment information as well as GPS coordinates.

The expert also found GPS coordinates associated with the people under surveillance and a list of trackers for locations of public cameras from which the footages were obtained.

The surveillance cameras are located in public locations like mosque,
hotel, police station, internet café, and restaurant. Gevers also revealed that the database was regularly being updated, in 24-hours he noticed that 6.7 million GPS coordinates were added to the archive.

Gevers’s discovery confirmed the concerns about the abuse of facial recognition for surveillance purposes, even if Chinese authorities always denied the accusation for the violation of minority rights.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – China, facial recognition)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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