Data of Polish users from the Chinese platform was leaked. The Office of Personal Data Protection intervened

At the end of March, there was a huge data leak from Pandabuy. This is a popular Chinese shipping platform that allows you to buy products from local online stores, such as Tmal or Toabao. It is famous, among other things, for selling replicas of famous brands of clothes and shoes. The data of approximately 1.3 million users was made public. An analysis by Surfshark, a cybersecurity company, shows that 17,000 of them came from Poland.

Data leaked from Pandabuy

This is such a serious violation of privacy that the matter was taken up by Mirosław Wróblewski, president of the Personal Data Protection Office. On April 29, he notified the Warsaw Śródmieście-Północ District Prosecutor’s Office about the suspicion of a crime committed by the perpetrators of publishing data of Polish customers of the pandabuy.com sales platform.

The information provided by the Office shows that names and surnames, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, user identifiers, IP addresses, passwords, delivery addresses, order and payment data were leaked.

Map of Poland with sensitive data. The head of the Personal Data Protection Office is working

The data has been published in aggregated forms on other websites. On April 7, they appeared on the website nazwa-drillowcow.pl in the form of an interactive map of Poland, which included, among others: names, surnames and addresses of Polish customers of this website. In the following days, the website was unavailable, but the map with data appeared at other addresses, such as “lista drillowcow.club” and “lista-drillowcow.xyz”.

“In the opinion of the President of the Personal Data Protection Office, the processing of personal data of Polish customers of the pandabuy.com sales platform, including their publication on the above-mentioned websites, by the persons administering these websites was carried out without a legal basis,” informs the Personal Data Protection Office in . It was also assured that Mirosław Wróblewski will take other actions “within the scope of his tasks and powers under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and national regulations.”

Poland is leaking. Data is leaking like crazy

The Pandabuy data leak was not the biggest one this year. The largest publicly known data breach from Poland was the data leak from the AI ​​video content creation platform, Cutout.Pro. At that time, almost 44,000 messages were found online. Polish emails.

Poland is extremely susceptible to this type of leaks. Surfshark’s analysis showed that 1.6 million user accounts were leaked in Poland in the first quarter of 2024. This means an increase of 79%. compared to the fourth quarter of 2023, Poland is the 14th country in the world and the 7th in Europe in terms of the number of incidents of this type recorded since 2004. “It is estimated that since 2004, an average of 14 accounts have been leaked every minute in Poland,” we read in the analysis.