An unknown hacker under the nickname FlamingChina has claimed to have hacked China’s state-owned supercomputer center and stolen more than 10 petabytes of data. Part of this array has already been put up for sale.
An unknown hacker under the nickname FlamingChina has claimed to have hacked China’s state-owned supercomputer center and stolen more than 10 petabytes of data. Part of this array has already been put up for sale.
According to CNN, the data samples include aerospace research, military development, bioinformatics, and modeling of complex physical processes. The data is being used to access the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, a government hub that serves more than 6,000 customers, including academic institutions and defense agencies.
The FlamingChina account posted some of the information on Telegram and is offering access to fragments for thousands of dollars, while the full archive is estimated at hundreds of thousands. According to experts who reviewed the materials, the leak includes documents marked «secret», technical files and visualizations of defense systems, including bombs and missiles.
Initial reports suggest that the system may have been accessed through a vulnerability in the VPN. The attacker then allegedly used a network of automated processes to gradually dump the data over several months. This approach avoids overloading the system and reduces the chances of being detected.
Experts say the technique itself is not unique, but it is effective. The data could have been downloaded in small chunks from different servers, making it difficult to detect the incident. However, the origin of the entire array and the details of the breach have not yet been independently confirmed.
A volume of 10 petabytes means approximately 10,000 terabytes of data. This is tens of thousands of times more than a regular laptop can store. According to experts, such an array is of value primarily to government agencies, since only they are capable of processing such a volume of information.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how Ukrainian hackers from the 4BID group claimed to have hacked a number of Russian websites and posted birthday greetings to the 3rd Army Corps on them.
