10 Petabytes of Chinese Secrets: Why the Theft Looks Like a Wild Fantasy Job
Ten petabytes of classified scientific and defense data vanished from China's National Supercomputing Center. The alleged sale price—hundreds of thousands of dollars—seems laughably small for the value of the material, suggesting the thieves are either delusional or severely misreading the black market.
Commenters are deeply suspicious of the entire operation. Many question the sheer technical impossibility of moving 10 PB undetected, with some pointing out the volume requires an amount of hardware that needs specific logistical planning. On the risk front, the debate splits sharply: some argue hacking a global power like China guarantees extreme state-level payback, while others argue that historical precedent makes immediate lethal retaliation pure speculation.
The weight of opinion suggests the sale is a scam, or at least fundamentally flawed. The consensus points to the difficulty of the transfer and the mismatch between perceived value and alleged payoff. The main fracture line remains between predicting Chinese government retaliation and dismissing the transaction as logistically impossible.
Key Points
The actual sale price for 10 PB of defense data is laughably low.
Multiple users agree the alleged sale price of hundreds of thousands of dollars vastly underestimates the value of the classified data.
Exfiltrating 10 PB without detection is highly questionable.
Commenters like ripcord question the methodology, while partofthevoice suggests it required 'siphoning over about six months' rather than a single massive download.
Risk of hacking China is immediate and severe.
404found asserts that dealing with a world power like China mandates extreme risk assessment, especially concerning national security.
Assessing geopolitical fallout from hacking China is speculative.
Alcoholicorn argues that immediate lethal retaliation is speculative, stating the risk depends heavily on the hacker's location and citizenship.
Data theft was likely a slow, distributed operation.
partofthevoice offered the detailed theory that the data was 'distributed across multiple systems' over a drawn-out period to avoid detection.
Source Discussions (3)
This report was synthesized from the following Lemmy discussions, ranked by community score.