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Unsurprisingly, centralizing your data between the private and public sector means everything is vulnerable at a centralized location.
The exposed materials include files labeled 'secret' in Chinese
In Chinese?!
Where do you even store 10 PB of data?
On your fidget spinner usb drive from a trade show
That may be uncompressed (and text and similar data compress really well).
Otherwise my bigger question is how did they transfer 10PB with no one noticing
how did they transfer 10PB with no one noticing
Siphoning. Really slowly.
Tricked it out. Naw mean?
Not to mention the logistics of transferring that much data alone. You need a high enough network speed to snag it all before being caught.
You could probably spread the exfil across a botnet of some kind, since I imagine the data will survive being chunked.
Minivan full of usb keys. Probably still the fastest data transfer method too.
If you were using 1tb micro SD cards you could fit them in a briefcase or two. It'd only cost $2 million at retail value of $200/card.
$200/card? What are those, legitimate western numbers?/s You can find "2TB" SD cards on AliExpress/etc for $3. Increasing the capacity to 1PT shouldn't be much more than a minor change in the firmware.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a uhaul truck"
Maybe on one of those drives that fake their size and at some point begin overwriting previous data. Metadata still there, but content of earlier files completely corrupt. /s
Hackers must have insane S3 bills
Just imagine the number of PUTs. I’ll bet it was mostly 100kb log files too. Them hackers gonna wish they never rsync’d that one. lmao
Tapes
They're selling those on AliExpress
I'm guessing that they wouldn't actually store that amount of data. Probably processing it on the fly and discarding a majority of it.
Maybe… or they could run up a credit card and bounce on the bill. The guy wasn’t asking for a lot of money, which indicates to me that they either want finances fast or they want to wash their hands fast.
How do you carry away petabytes?
They paid for WinZip
Just compress it with PiedPiper
how do you exfiltrate that much data without anyone noticing?
and dude wanted some puny change for it, like a million bucks or something lol.
It’s a supercomputer center, so I imagine large data transfer is normal in the environment. They could have piggybacked on existing high-throughput data workflows, or somehow blended into expected large transfers. Data can be exfiltrated over weeks or months, across multiple endpoints or accounts, … and compression could have happened prior to transfer (meaning the transfer may have been smaller than 10PB). Monitoring could have been inadequate or bypassed.
I imagine the puny change could be indicative of wanting a fast sale. Possibly, if they decided to store the data on cloud drives via a credit line. They might want a sale before the bill comes.
Edit: yup
According to the alleged attacker, they gained access through a compromised VPN domain, then deployed a botnet to extract data. Instead of transferring data in bulk, the attacker distributed the exfiltration across multiple systems and moved 'smaller' amounts over about six months to avoid detection. Such a method relies more on exploiting system architecture than on advanced hacking techniques, which in part helped the perpetrator to avoid detection.
Curious to see if another LeakBase will pop up around this. I'm already hearing rumors that a lot of it was AI training data but that's unfounded squiddy speak on social media.
you'd need a data center just to hold that much information! it's not like your using cloud storage for this, this is an expensive payload
A petabyte is 1000 terabytes. There are commercial hard drives that are over 30 tb. So 33 of these drives hold 1 pb. Times ten makes 330 hard drives to hold 10 pb. All of those drives together would take up just one third of a single full height server rack like this.
https://www.quantumtechnologyequipment.net/products/s6llst3137
So not only wouldn't it need a whole data center, in fact it wouldn't even need a whole server room, and actually wouldn't even need a whole server closet!
I calculated this all out only because I'm procrastinating😆
Tape storage is probably even cheaper and more space efficient
With modern high capacity drives, it's possible to have that storage in a single rack. If would probably be about $500,000 worth of drives though.
Did it supposed to stop “be”? Or did OP hit the enter too soon?
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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