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- ‘FlamingChina’ claimes 10PB of data was stolen from the supercomputer
- The supercomputer was used by numerous military and civilian entities
- Samples of the data show simulations of aircraft, missiles, and bombs
An individual or group calling itself ‘FlamingChina’ claims to have stolen over 10 petabytes of highly sensitive military information from China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.
The breach remains unverified, but samples posted by the hacker show “research across various fields including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation and more,” the group says.
The hacker is now offering a potentially record-breaking dataset for sale with a price tag in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency.
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What was in the stolen data?
FlamingChina claims the data stolen includes highly secret information from “top organizations” such as Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), and China’s National University of Defense Technology.
Analysis performed by experts and shared by CNN suggests that the data may be genuine, and contains schematics and renderings of military equipment, including aircraft, missiles, and bombs.
FlamingChina posted the data for sale on February 6 2026, claiming the extraction took place over several months.
The breach, if confirmed, could help explain why multiple top experts in aviation, nuclear weapons, radar and missile systems were seemingly removed from the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) site without explanation at some point in March of this year.
Speaking to CNN, Dakota Cary, a consultant at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, said that the samples stolen are “exactly what I would expect to see from the supercomputing center.”
“You would use supercomputer centers for large computational tasks. The swath of samples that the sellers put out kind of really speaks to the breadth of customers that this supercomputing center had,” Cary continued.
The haul of 10 petabytes is an enormous amount of data, as there are 1024 terabytes in a petabyte, meaning the total breach is around 10,240 terabytes, or well over 10 million gigabytes.
Cybersecurity researcher and author of the blog NetAskari, Marc Hofer, claimed to have spoken to someone claiming to be FlamingChina via Telegram. The hacker said that they used a compromised VPN domain to gain access to the Tianjin supercomputer.
They claimed that the 10 petabytes of data was slowly extracted over a period of six months using a botnet. The botnet would steadily extract and download the data from multiple supercomputer servers at the same time. The steady flow of small packets of data was likely intended to prevent any defense mechanisms from spotting a large flow of outgoing data.
FlamingChina was likely able to successfully pull off the heist because it relied less on malware, and more on vulnerabilities within the supercomputer’s architecture.
What is the National Supercomputer Center?
The National Supercomputer Center of Tianjin was opened in 2009, and serves over 6,000 entities with the high-speed computing power needed for complex simulations. The supercomputer is used by entities across 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 dataset a potentially attractive asset to foreign intelligence agencies – even with the hefty price tag.
The Tianjin Economic Development Area website describes the supercomputer as “an indispensable technology support for cutting-edge S&T innovation and industry upgrading” that “serves increasingly diversified clients from research institutes, universities, government agencies to businesses and beyond.”
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