Overview
- An account using the name FlamingChina posted sample files on Telegram on February 6, claiming more than 10 petabytes of research spanning aerospace, military work, bioinformatics, and fusion simulation.
- Cybersecurity researchers who examined the samples reported documents labeled “secret” in Chinese along with missile schematics and weapons simulations that match the kind of workloads hosted at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.
- The sellers are offering small previews for thousands of dollars and say full access costs in the hundreds of thousands, with payment in cryptocurrency, while the full archive has not been released and remains unverified in its entirety.
- A researcher who contacted the alleged intruder said the attacker described using a compromised VPN entry point and a botnet to pull data in small chunks over roughly six months, a method that exploits supercomputing setups with shared file systems and weak outbound traffic controls.
- The Tianjin center supports more than 6,000 clients in science, industry, and defense, which could give foreign state services rich intelligence if the cache is real, though some experts doubt that 10 petabytes could be moved and stored without detection.