(CFP)

In January, Wang Cheng, a local resident in Beijing, ordered a portable hard drive from Dangdang.com, a leading Chinese B2C site, but received two deliveries.

Wang signed for the first package and paid 399 yuan ($63.33) as required without hesitation, because the deliveryman had Wang's address, phone number and correct purchase information. Shortly after the deliveryman left, Wang found what he had received was a fake product.

When the courier who had Wang's real purchase arrived half an hour later, Wang realized that he had been scammed. "I'm afraid information about my transactions on Dangdang was hacked," he said.

It was reported last December that the information of Dangdang's 12 million users had been leaked online.

In recent years data security has become a pressing issue in China, especially since last December, when a spate of cases involving the illegal trade of personal information occurred.

On March 15, the China Center for Information Industry Development (CCID), a research institution affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), released a report about online personal information security.

According to the report, the security situation regarding personal information at 105 popular Chinese websites was "bad" and on mobile devices it was "terrible," said Gao Chiyang, Executive President of Beijing CCID.

"About 60 percent of Internet users have encountered personal data losses online, according to our survey," said Liu Jiuru, Deputy Director of the MIIT's Electronic Technology Information Research Institute.

Since April 20, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) launched a crackdown on crimes involving personal information of citizens in 20 provincial-level regions.

By April 27, the police had cut off 44 "major sources" selling citizens' personal information and apprehended 1,936 suspects. According to a statement released by the ministry, 978 of these suspects are currently in police custody for criminal offenses.

"Illegal trading in personal information has been rampant, and it has led to criminal activities such as telecom fraud, blackmail, kidnapping and illegal debt collection," said the statement.

Open information

On December 20, 2011, more than 6 million user accounts and passwords on CSDN, the country's biggest online communities for IT programmers, were made public after hacker attacks.

A few days later, 360buy, China's second largest B2C site in business volume, was also reported to have fallen victim to data breaches. Normal Web users could see the registration information of the company's other users, including names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mails, after they logged on.

On December 28, 2011, user information of Alipay.com, a third-party payment service provider that has up to 25 million accounts, was found to have been hacked and exposed.

Other high-profile websites have also been involved in data leaks, including social networking sites such as Tianya, Kaixin001, Renren and Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like service that has 250 million registered users.

As online data leaks increased, the official micro-blog of Aitike, an Internet industry website, disclosed on December 29 last year that a large number of bank customers in China have had their account details leaked, including customers of the Bank of Communication (BOC), China Minsheng Bank (CMB), and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC).

The micro-blog said more than 100 million accounts at the three banks had been affected, including 70 million from the BOC and 35 million from the CMB. A screenshot of some customer names and passwords from the three banks was attached.

In response to these leaks, the MIIT issued a notice on December 28 last year, asking Internet service providers to beef up protection of user information through better internal management and new technologies.

Liu Siyu, Director of the Security Research Team at the Beijing Rising Information Technology Co. Ltd., a leading Internet security company in China, said that many Chinese enterprises are vulnerable to hackers because they failed to take adequate precautions when setting up their websites in the first place. "Most executives in China hesitate to invest in security departments because they do not generate profits for the company," Liu said.

An inside job

Last October, police authorities of Beijing and Guangdong Province looked into several organized crime cases where personal information had been illegally accessed.