A security expert said a hacker has allegedly stolen sensitive information from a Chinese supercomputer and is trying to sell it online
A hacker has allegedly attempted to sell off a massive chunk of sensitive information supposedly stolen from a state-run Chinese supercomputer.
Top secret defence documents and missile diagram are reportedly among the supposed taken data. Experts have suggested the dataset, thought to hold over 10 petabytes of confidential information, could have been nicked from the National Supercomputing Centre in Tianjin, in the north of the country, where a centralised hub is located.
This apparent massive data breach could be the biggest known hacking of sensitive information from China. A Telegram account calling itself FlamingChina reportedly shared part of the alleged sensitive Chinese information online.
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The account claimed the data included “research across various fields including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation and more”, according to CNN.
The “FlamingChina” group also claimed the data was linked to several “top organisations” including the Chinese aviation industry and defence technology.
A cyber expert who has spoken to the alleged hackers and looked at the data said they seemed to access the supercomputer and take information over several months without being noticed, reports CNN.
An expert reportedly said the hacking group had offered a preview of the supposedly stolen information for thousands. They claimed some of the documents, including technical files and diagrams of defence equipment, were marked “secret” in Chinese.
Dakota Cary, a consultant at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, who has looked at the sample data online said: “They’re exactly what I would expect to see from the supercomputing centre.”
Cary added: “You would use supercomputer centres 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 centre had.”
This comes as Brits have been warned that elite Russian hackers are breaking into routers typically used in the UK and getting their hands on people’s personal data. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre said a Russian state-linked hacker group APT28 then quietly reroutes users’ internet traffic through malicious servers under their control.
The advisory, from Tuesday, said the group had exploited vulnerable internet routers to enable Domain Name System (DNS) hijacking operations. The NCSC added that this would enable hackers to intercept traffic and harvest login credentials – including passwords and access tokens from personal web and email services.
Paul Chichester, NCSC’s director of operations, said: “This activity demonstrates how exploited vulnerabilities in widely used network devices can be leveraged by sophisticated hostile actors. We strongly encourage organisations and network defenders to familiarise themselves with the techniques described in the advisory and to follow the mitigation advice.”
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