China is rumored to have suffered a shattering national security breach

 by Andrea Widburg

Before now, most of us were probably unaware of the term “petabyte,” which is equal to a million gigabytes. Ten petabytes is an incomprehensibly large number, equal to 2-3 billion books, 2 million HD movies, or hours of global internet traffic. But it’s an important number because it is the amount of data allegedly stolen from China’s National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin, which holds classified military data. This story is very “alleged,” because China has said nothing, but tech sources think at least some of the report is true.

An organization calling itself FlamingChina has posted on Telegram and other dark web sites that it hacked the NSCC, shared a few examples of the data now in its possession, and offered to sell it to the highest bidder. That could easily be an empty boast or a con to sell fake data, but according to one report, some computer experts think the material FlamingChina posted has the look of the real thing:

The post claimed that the dataset included “research across various fields including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation and more.”

Online samples of the hacked data appear to show internal folders, login details, technical manuals and schematics linked to weapons testing and aerospace work.

Cyber experts have reviewed samples of the stolen data and appear to think it is genuine.

China has not confirmed anything, but that doesn’t mean the data breach hasn’t happened. Regimes like China will never admit to a massive attack on their computers, especially because China, for decades, has been the one attacking other computer systems, whether commercial or government.

And of course, this still could be a con. While it’s true that FlamingChina provided a very small data sample, that sample might be all it has. People are allegedly paying thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency for these samples, but there’s no definitive evidence yet that the group has anything beyond snippets (or, again, that the samples are real).

CNN has picked up on the story and offered a hypothesis about what it could mean if the hacker group really did break into the Tianjin NSCC, which is “a centralized hub that provides infrastructure services for more than 6,000 clients across China, including advanced science and defense agencies.”

The report from CNN explains that the documents currently available aren’t just generic science documents. Instead, they are marked “secret” and contain “technical files, animated simulations and renderings of defense equipment including bombs and missiles.” Cybersecurity experts agree that “the size of the dataset would make it attractive to adversarial state intelligence services.” I imagine that the US government would also be very interested.

If the data breach is real, it gets added to the list of problems currently bedeviling China, chief among which is its struggle to obtain oil since Trump seized Venezuela’s Maduro and began the military action in Iran. Before all this started, China was getting around 2 million barrels of oil per day from those two countries. Trump’s actions disrupted that supply.

Currently, China is drawing on stockpiles (which, notably, we don’t have since Biden sold off our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help Democrats in the midterm election) and substituting Russian and Brazilian oil for the lost Venezuelan and Iranian oil. It’s managed to restore its flow, but at a much greater cost due to shipping issues and rising oil prices.

When you add its oil woes to the problems China has had managing the impact of Trump’s tariffs (e.g., disrupted trade with its one-time best customer, America, the necessity of finding new markets, pumping government money into the economy to offset the trade loss, etc.), China’s economy is, to use a non-technical term, not happy. It’s certainly not in free-fall, because it’s already adapted to the tariffs, but it’s not roaring, with an estimated .3 to 1.0 percentage point drop in GDP from the tariffs alone. To all this, you can add China’s other woes, which are explained in greater detail here and here.

In other words, Trump’s actions haven’t dealt a death blow to the Chinese economy, but they’ve certainly given it a bad cold. The last thing China needs is for massive amounts of national security information to be on the open black market. (Of course, given how poorly Chinese weapons systems have performed in Venezuela and Iran, maybe those buying its secrets aren’t getting a lot of bang for the buck.)

If you want a deeper dive, Shanaka Anselm Perera, an Australian analyst, offers his take on what this all means for China:

Anyone who underestimates China is making a huge mistake. Trump has never made that mistake, for he views China as America’s most formidable geopolitical adversary. However, it’s possible that, thanks to a combination of China’s internal weaknesses, Trump’s actions, and this alleged hack, China is somewhat weakened (albeit still very dangerous).

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/04/china_is_rumored_to_have_suffered_a_shattering_national_security_breach.html