TECH Hacker breaches China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, stealing over 10PB of sensitive data

auxman

auxman

Deus vult...
Faytuks Network:

A hacker using the alias “FlamingChina” claims to have breached China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, stealing over 10PB of data spanning aerospace, military research, bioinformatics and fusion simulations, and is offering access for sale in cryptocurrency — CNN

(2/4) Experts who reviewed samples say files marked “secret,” technical simulations, and defense-related schematics appear consistent with supercomputing workloads, though CNN cannot independently verify the breach.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2042112883702538302
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/2042112883702538302


(3/4) The attacker allegedly accessed the system via a compromised VPN and used a distributed botnet to quietly extract data over months, avoiding detection by spreading transfers across multiple servers.

(4/4) Analysts say the scale of the dataset could make it highly valuable to state intelligence agencies, while the incident, if confirmed, highlights longstanding cybersecurity weaknesses in China’s critical infrastructure

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2042112887666127020
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/2042112887666127020
 
Southside

Southside

Has No Timebombs, Lives on Life
Just looked it up
A petabyte (PB) is equivalent to 1,024 terabytes (TB), or roughly one quadrillion bytes. Storing 10 petabytes of data would cost between $500,000 and $13 million depending on whether you use raw hard drives, enterprise cloud services, or on-premises server racks. Stealing this amount of data over a high-speed corporate connection (1 Gbps) would take approximately 3.1 years of continuous transfer.
 
P

Publius

On TB every waking moment
Southside said:
Just looked it up
A petabyte (PB) is equivalent to 1,024 terabytes (TB), or roughly one quadrillion bytes. Storing 10 petabytes of data would cost between $500,000 and $13 million depending on whether you use raw hard drives, enterprise cloud services, or on-premises server racks. Stealing this amount of data over a high-speed corporate connection (1 Gbps) would take approximately 3.1 years of continuous transfer.
Click to expand...
I'm no computer expert but if any of this is true then he had time to route this info to somewhere and the Chinese never caught on to this transfer of data.
 
DFENZ

DFENZ

Senior Member
Macgyver said:
I was reading some twits about this yesterday.

Tech Bros are very sceptical this is real.

Moving that amount alone and having a place to put it is issue.
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Yeah, it doesn't sound plausible. 10pb is a lot of data - about half the contents of the Library of Congress - the largest library in the world. That includes videos - everything. Put another way, that's about 200 million tall filing cabinets filled with documents.
 
L

Luddite

Has No Life - Lives on TB
Blacknarwhal said:
Steal data from China, get what?
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I wonder if the yellow squinties deliberately released this as a threat to the US.
Secrets could be released in dribs and drabs with some superficial deniability.


Eta: I wonder if a paradigm shift in energy production might be included in the info...
Making oil obsolete would surely upset the world applecart.
 
Ractivist

Ractivist

Pride comes before the fall.....Pride month ended.
Or.......a government entity somewhere did the deed....and is showing China, we too have access to your stuff....and we do know of all your back doors ...now. Calling President Trump...you dog you...now your trolling xi..nice.
 
P

Publius

On TB every waking moment
Ractivist said:
Or.......a government entity somewhere did the deed....and is showing China, we too have access to your stuff....and we do know of all your back doors ...now. Calling President Trump...you dog you...now your trolling xi..nice.
Click to expand...

There is the great firewall of china and it's not just software, it's maned 24/7 by people loyal to the government.
The Chinese are hacking every government on the planet so there are free up portholes for data to go in and out, the trick is finding the porthole's.
 
stop tyranny

stop tyranny

Veteran Member
(a) An intentional release of useless data along with a lot of misinformation designed to incriminate perceived threats and provide misinformation on technological and military capabilities.
(b) A scam with a big payday.
(c) A combination of the two in order to make the information look legit.

The fact that an anti-Trump propaganda network is breaking the story may suggest that some of the misinformation maybe for the purpose of incriminating Trump or those within his administration.
 
M

marsofold

Veteran Member
Hackers are a special breed. I tried it in the late 1990s by successfully hacking into Netzero to get unlimited free internet. My computer guru at the time thought that I was crazy for risking jail over it, so after a few months, on his advice, I quit the free internet thing. I remember years ago reading about some hacker who had successfully hacked into the very deepest secrets of Israel, eventually leading to his arrest. It turned out to be a 17 year old Israeli kid who did it just for his own amusement. After being found guilty in court, the Israeli government told the judge that the kid was a unique national asset. That there was nobody else in all of Israel even close to his degree of hacking skills and that they wanted to use him to hack into other enemy country's secure computers. So the judge gave the kid two options: go to prison or work for Mossad. He chose the second option and is probably a big wig in their military hacking division today. Dennis wants more paragraph breaks in my posts so I'm creating one here.

As far as the dark web being used to dispense the Chinese secrets, maybe. Anyone who has ever eyeballed the dark web would immediately discover the total lack of law enforcement there. Sales of bulk drugs, stolen credit card numbers, machine guns, and even free child porn displayed on advertising banners below most of the search engines there. The search engine Ahmia advertises itself there as one of the few search engines there not permitting child porn search returns or advertising. The search engine Tordex there actually advertises itself as specializing in child porn! One of my brothers used to use the dark web to order weed that was delivered right to his house, probably using the Dread forum there. So it's exactly the kind of place where hackers would sell info. However, the encrypted TOR network on it transfers data at only a 2Mb/second rate, painfully slow by any modern standards, so moving petabytes of data across it doesn't seem possible. Perhaps they only cherry pick the best stuff to sell there, which would take up less bandwidth. A dark place indeed, but truly the last place where law enforcement is utterly unable to touch. A hacker's paradise.
 
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wait-n-see

wait-n-see

Veteran Member
IMO, If any of this is truth, then the actors are Chinese Nationals in a military organization.

And if so, my guess is that they just bought a world of extreme hurt, not only for themselves, but for their extended families/relatives.
 
Groucho

Groucho

Has No Life - Lives on TB
Shooter said:
ok ill ask. WTF is a PB
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Oh, that's a BFN. (Big F ing Number) As others have said, I have no idea how long it took to gather all that info. Storage? Maybe the CIA owns one or two of those huge "data centers?"
But then, I wonder if this story is even true. And if it's a lie, cui bono?
 
Shooter

Shooter

Veteran Member
just thinking out loud here , What if? someone had gotten hacks into many different systems, and released very secret files, try to make the chins think that they had really gotten everything. this would cause hell in them, trying to find out what happened. and if they had also loaded a virus into each section. the damage would be compounded
 
C

CaBuckeye

Veteran Member
Trying to believe that he download 10 Petabytes of data from anywhere AND having a place to store it is very hard to believe. Asking for crypto-currency that probably can be tracked is another. Somehow I feel this guy really wants VISA gift cards.
 
Kayak

Kayak

Adrenaline Junkie
Southside said:
Just looked it up
A petabyte (PB) is equivalent to 1,024 terabytes (TB), or roughly one quadrillion bytes. Storing 10 petabytes of data would cost between $500,000 and $13 million depending on whether you use raw hard drives, enterprise cloud services, or on-premises server racks.
Click to expand...
Nah. A few high-capacity hard drives for the download, and then offload the data to tapes, cycling through the hard drives and rewriting once the data is off. Still not cheap, but less than $100,000 dollars to store it all.
 
LoupGarou

LoupGarou

Ancient Fuzzball
What is scary is that with Nimbus or Solidigm drives (they both make 100TB and larger SSDs) dropped into an EMC (Dell) drive array, you could have that capacity (10PB) and even more in a single full size server rack. Price is astronomical, but not impossible.

And they make very scary density physical (spinning media) hard drives nearing the 52TB range, so heat assisted mag media would get you there probably for a quarter of the price of the SSD route, but I'm not sure I fully trust the heat assisted method quite yet for long term stability...
 
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