China’s Tianjin Supercomputing Center hit by ‘unprecedented’ cyber breach — What’s at stake

China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin has suffered a massive cyber attack, siphoning over 10 petabytes of sensitive information.

A hacker alias FlamingChina has claimed to steal a massive trove of confidential data, including classified defense documents and research papers.

National Supercomputing Center serves as a hub opened in 2009 and it also supports over 6,000 clients including defense agencies and aerospace firms like AVIC and COMAC, and civilian scientific research groups.

Sensitive information at stake

The hacker entered via a compromised VPN, used a botnet to extract data like classified defense documents and missile & bomb schematics, aerospace and aviation research, and bioinformatics & fusion simulation data.

Now, the hacker is selling previews and full access for thousands in cryptocurrency on Telegram, claiming it “contained “research across various fields including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation and more.”

As reported by CNN, the cyber experts who reviewed the posted samples, called them “authentic” and noted that the hacker appeared to gain access to the documents with “comparative ease.”

The intruder reportedly maintained access for several months, extracting massive datasets without triggering internal detection systems.

Dakota Cary, a consultant at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne who focuses on China, said “They’re exactly what I would expect to see from the supercomputing center.

“There are leaks from China’s cyber ecosystem that I’m familiar with that have sold very quickly. I’m sure that there are plenty of governments globally that are interested in some of the data at the NSCC, but many of those governments that are interested also may already have the data,” he added.

For the unversed, one petabyte (PB) is equivalent to 1,000 terabytes (TB). Since a modern, high-spec laptop usually comes with a 1 TB hard drive, one would need exactly 1,000 of those laptops to hold just one petabyte of data.

The recent data breach marks the largest known heist of data from China, leading to potential security crisis.