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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Anton Shilov

10 petabytes of sensitive data stolen from China's National Supercomputing Center, hackers claim — daring heist would be largest ever China hack, covering 6,000 clients across science, defense, and beyond

A security specialist.

A hacker (or hacker group) claims to have extracted more than 10 petabytes (1PB = 1000 TB) of highly sensitive information from China's National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin, which could be the largest known data breach involving Chinese infrastructure. Although the incident remains unverified, its nature and scale — data was stolen from 6,000 state-controlled entities — may point to a systemic weakness in China's critical infrastructure, which has serious implications, reports CNN.

The dataset is said to originate from China's National Supercomputing Center, a centralized high-performance computing facility that supports over 6,000 entities from research, industrial, and defense sectors. Indeed, the alleged content spans multiple disciplines, including aerospace engineering, bioinformatics, fusion modeling, and other fields studied using supercomputer simulations. The individual or group behind the breach, which goes by the name of FlamingChina, released a sample in a Telegram channel in February, claiming the archive contains research tied to such organizations as the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), and the National University of Defense Technology.

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