The RaHDIt Russian hacker group has handed over information on Russian citizens who have been collaborating with Ukrainian military intelligence to competent authorities, a RaHDIt member told Sputnik on condition of anonymity. Earlier this month, RaHDit hackers leaked information on thousands of officers of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense (GUR, or HUR). The hackers said that the published data contains information about the relatives of the said officers and people living together with them, as well as individuals who have been receiving payments from GUR bank accounts.

“We handed over the identified contacts of our [Russian] citizens with employees from that list of Ukrainian military intelligence officers… The list is quite extensive,” a RaHDIt member told Sputnik.

According to data leaked by RaHDIt, among Ukrainian GUR officers, there are drug addicts and former criminals convicted of robbery, illegal trafficking of weapons and drugs, infliction of grave bodily injuries, and rape. The disclosed spies include representatives of diplomatic missions in Russia, India, Austria, Vietnam, South Africa, Italy, Turkey and Iran. Data on military intelligence curators in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia, as well as instructors in sabotage and representatives of special forces for conducting undercover and power intelligence, has also been leaked.

A source in one of the Russia special services has confirmed to Sputnik the authenticity of the data leaked by RaHDit hackers. The group said that it had handed over the data to law enforcement bodies.

Earlier this month, a hacker claiming to have stolen personal data from hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens began selling the information online.

A sample of 750,000 entries posted online by the hacker showed citizens’ names, mobile phone numbers, national ID numbers, addresses, birthdays, and police reports they had filed.

At the time, AFP and cybersecurity experts had verified some of the citizen data in the sample as authentic, but the scope of the entire database is hard to determine.

Advertised on a forum late last month but only picked up by cybersecurity experts this week, the 23TB database — which the hacker claims contains the records of a billion Chinese citizens — is being sold for 10 Bitcoins.

Growing public awareness of data privacy has led to stronger data protection laws targeting individuals and private firms in recent years, although there is little citizens can do to stop the state from collecting their data.