databreaches.net Posted on September 8, 2025 by Dissent
Some data breaches make headlines for the number of people affected globally, such as a Facebook scraping incident in 2019 that affected 553 million people worldwide. Then there are breaches that affect a country’s entire population or much of it, such as a misconfigured database that exposed almost the entire population of Ecuador in 2019, an insider breach that compromised the information of almost all Israelis in 2006, a misconfigured voter database that exposed more than 75% of Mexican voters in 2016, and the UnitedHealth Change Healthcare ransomware incident in 2024 that affected more than 190 million Americans.
And now there’s Vietnam. ShinyHunters claims to have successfully attacked and exfiltrated more than 160 million records from the Credit Institute of Vietnam, which manages the country’s state-run National Credit Information Center. Vietnam National Credit Information Center is a public non-business organization directly under the State Bank of Vietnam, performing the function of national credit registration; collecting, processing, storing and analyzing credit information; preventing and limiting credit risks; scoring and rating the credit of legal entities and natural persons within the territory of Vietnam; and providing credit information products and services in accordance with the provisions of the State Bank and the law.
While those affiliated with ShinyHunters bragged on Telegram that Vietnam was “owned within 24 hours,” ShinyHunters listed the data for sale on a hacking forum, and provided a large sample of data from what they described as more than 160 million records with “very sensitive information including general PII, credit payment, risks analysis, Credit cards (require you’re own deciphering of the FDE algorithm), Military ID’s, Government ID’s Tax ID’s, Income Statements, debts owed, and more.”
DataBreaches asked ShinyHunters for additional details about the incident, including how many unique individuals were in the data, because the country’s entire population is slightly under 102 million. ShinyHunters responded that the data set included historical data. They stated that they did not know how many unique individuals were involved, but were pretty sure they got the entire population.
Because this incident did not seem to be consistent with ShinyHunters’ recent campaigns, DataBreaches asked how they picked the target and how they gained access. According to ShinyHunters, they picked the target because it held a massive amount of data. The total amount or records (line) across all tables was like 3 billion or more, they said, and they gained access by an n-day exploit. On follow-up, DataBreaches asked whether this was an exploit that CIC could have been able to patch. There was no actual patch available, Shiny stated, as the software was end-of-life.
In response to a question as to whether the CIC had responded to any extortion or ransom demands, ShinyHunters stated that there had been no ransom attempt at all because ShinyHunters assumed they would not get any response at all.
DataBreaches emailed the CIC to ask them about the claims, but has received no reply by publication. If CIC responds to DataBreaches’ inquiries, this post will be updated, but it is important to note that there is no confirmation of ShinyHunters’ claims at this point, however credible their claims may appear.
It is also important to note that this post has referred to this as an attack by ShinyHunters and has not attributed it to Scattered Spider or Lapsus$. When DataBreaches asked which group(s) to attribute this to, ShinyHunters had replied, “It wasn’t a Scattered Spider type of hack … so ShinyHunters.” ShinyHunters acknowledged that they need to deal with the name situation, but said, “I don’t know how to fix the name problem considering for years everyone thought both are completely different groups.”
The attack is just the latest in a string targeting the multilateral body in recent years.
Japan's space agency was hit with a cyberattack but the information the hackers accessed did not include anything important for rocket and satellite operations, a spokesperson said on Wednesday.
