Chinese government supercomputer breached, hacker claims 10PB data theft

A hacker has claimed to have breached a Chinese supercomputer with “comparative ease” and stolen 10 petabytes of data, which they now plan to sell online.

According to CNN, a state-run Chinese supercomputer, in the National Computing Center in Tianjin, came under an allegedly successful cyberattack which resulted in the stealing of highly sensitive classified defence documents and missile schematics.

If true, the hack would mark the largest known cyberheist of data from China.

A sample of the stolen data was shared on a Telegram channel on February 6 by a user named FlamingChina. The account claimed that the data contains research across various fields, including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation and more.

Cybersecurity experts who reviewed the allegedly stolen data said that the hacker group was offering only a chunk of what they had and reportedly demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for full access to what they claimed to be 10PB of stolen secrets.

Though the stolen data could not be verified independently, cyber experts told the outlet that it contains some documents marked “secret” in the Chinese language.

The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology has yet to comment on the matter.