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.”

databreaches.net - Chatox and Brosix are communications platforms that advertise for personal use and team use. They are owned by Stefan Chekanov.

The only statement Chatox makes about its data security is “Chatox employs encryption across all communications, making it an extremely secure communication and collaboration platform.”

Brosix Enterprise advertises its security:

Brosix provides you with an efficient and secure communication environment, and Text Chat is a central element of this. With this feature you can instantly send, and receive, text messages to your network contacts. Better yet, all messages sent with Brosix are fully encrypted using end-to-end encryption technology, guaranteeing that your communication remains secure.

Brosix uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard, used by US government) with 256 bit keys. Which means the encryption can’t be broken in a reasonable time.

All communication channels are direct, peer-to-peer, between the users and are not routed through Brosix servers. In some cases, if user firewalls do not allow direct connection, data is routed through Brosix servers. In these rare cases, the channels through the servers are built in a way that Brosix cannot decrypt and see the user data that flows.

So why did a researcher find a lot sensitive chats in plain text with individuals’ first and last names, username, password, IP address, chat message, and attached files — all unencrypted?

What to Know
A researcher contacted DataBreaches after finding an unsecured backup with 155.3 GB of unique compressed files.
There was a total of 980,972 entries in the users’ tables, with entries going back to 2006.
The researcher first logged the backup as exposed in late April. From the logs, the researcher stated that the files in question were exposed from at least May 11th 2024 – July 4th 2025 . Because logging only began in late April, the server could have been exposed before then.
The top email domains for each of the two platforms are listed below:
Brosix Enterprise Database Chatox Database
14826 gmail.com
5472 yahoo.com
2086 hotmail.com
1805 mail.ru
1111 allstate.com
679 rankinteractive.com
633 yandex.ru
582 issta.co.il
376 outlook.com
353 gp-servicedirect.com 63291 mail.ru
48075 gmail.com
20099 yandex.ru
13789 yahoo.com
7868 hotmail.com
6734 bk.ru
4541 allstate.com
3316 rambler.ru
3297 inbox.ru
3204 list.ru

Developing: Someone claiming to be an “affiliate plus” for AlphV claims they were responsible for the Change Healthcare attack but that AlphV stole the payment Change Healthcare had made and suspended the affiliate’s account.

The affiliate’s claims appeared on Ramp Forum and have been circulating since then. The post can be seen below, via @vx-underground:

Over on SuspectFile, Marco A. De Felice reports that the NoEscape ransomware gang is threatening to release 1.5 TB of data from PruittHealth Network. De Felice...