- ‘FlamingChina’ claims 10PB of supercomputer data stolen
- The supercomputer was used by numerous military and civil entities.
- Data samples show simulations of planes, missiles and bombs.
An individual or group calling itself ‘FlamingChina’ claims to have stolen more than 10 petabytes of highly sensitive military information from China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.
The breach has not yet been verified, but the samples posted by the hacker show “research in various fields, including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation, and more,” the group says.
The hacker is now offering a potentially record-breaking data set for sale priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency.
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What was in the stolen data?
FlamingChina claims that the stolen data includes highly secret information from “major organizations” such as the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) and the China National University of Defense Technology.
Analysis performed by experts and shared by cnn suggests that the data may be genuine and contain schematics and representations of military equipment, including aircraft, missiles and bombs.
FlamingChina posted the data for sale on February 6, 2026, stating that the mining took place over several months.
The breach, if confirmed, could help explain why several leading experts in aviation, nuclear weapons, radar and missile systems were apparently removed from the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) site without explanation sometime in March this year.
talking to cnnDakota Cary, a consultant at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, said the stolen samples are “exactly what you would expect to see from the supercomputing center.”
“Supercomputing centers would be used for large computational tasks. The swath of samples that vendors released really speaks to the breadth of customers this supercomputing center had,” Cary continued.
The 10 petabyte haul is a huge amount of data, as there are 1,024 terabytes in one petabyte, meaning the total breach is around 10,240 terabytes, or more than 10 million gigabytes.
Cybersecurity researcher and author of the NetAskari blog, Marc Hofer, claimed to have spoken to someone claiming to be FlamingChina via Telegram. The hacker said he used a compromised VPN domain to gain access to the Tianjin supercomputer.
They claimed that the 10 petabytes of data were slowly extracted over a six-month period using a botnet. The botnet would constantly extract and download data from multiple supercomputer servers at the same time. The constant flow of small data packets was probably intended to prevent any defense mechanism from detecting a large flow of outgoing data.
FlamingChina was likely able to pull off the heist successfully because it relied less on malware and more on vulnerabilities within the supercomputer architecture.
What is the National Supercomputing Center?
The Tianjin National Supercomputer Center opened in 2009 and serves more than 6,000 entities with the high-speed computing power needed for complex simulations. The supercomputer is used by entities in the research, industrial and defense sectors. Supercomputers are often used for aviation modeling, nuclear detonation simulations, and even AI training.
Numerous military, defense and intelligence projects likely relied on the National Supercomputer Center for modeling and simulations, making the data set a potentially attractive asset to foreign intelligence agencies, even with the high price tag.
The Tianjin Economic Development Area website describes the supercomputer as “an indispensable technological support for cutting-edge scientific and technological innovation and industry modernization” that “serves increasingly diversified customers, from research institutes, universities, government agencies to enterprises and more.”
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