FlamingChina hacker claims to have stolen over 10 petabytes of advanced military data from Chinas National Supercomputing Center in possibly the biggest hack of all time

Date:
Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:05:00 +0000

Description:
A hacker is claiming to have breached Chinese supercomputer through a compromised VPN domain.

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now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Join the club Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards. Explore An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter '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 Chinas 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. Article continues below You may like Massive Chinese data breach allegedly spills 8.7 billion records - here's what we know Telus Digital confirms breach - hackers allegedly stole 'almost 1 petabyte of data' The biggest heist of the US-China Chip War: 3 Supermicro employees charged with conspiracy to smuggle
restricted Nvidia H100, H200, and B200 chips to China dummy boxes, fake labels, and a pass-through company enabled the $2.5 billion scheme 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 Chinas 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. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news
and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

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. How did FlamingChina extract 10 petabytes of data? 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. What to read next EU cyberattack may have been worse than we thought - 90GB of data published online as 30 entities hit Chinese hackers hide malware within Windows and Google Drive to hit government targets 'By replacing a legitimate update with a malicious one, they turned the products update flow into a malware distribution channel': Experts find flaw in TrueConf video conferencing tool used by governments, military

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 supercomputers 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. The best antivirus for all budgets Our top picks, based on real-world testing and comparisons

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