The dataset, which allegedly contains more than 10 petabytes of sensitive information, is believed by experts to have been obtained from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin – a centralized hub that provides infrastructure services for more than 6,000 clients across China, including advanced science and defense agencies.
What’s crazy is the hacker is trying to sell extremely classified Chinese defense information for only ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto’. You can get a preview for ‘thousands of dollars’.
Is it worth placing a huge target on yourself for less than a million dollars? It’s unfortunate I will never read a follow-up on this story.
Is it worth placing a huge target on yourself for less than a million dollars?
Depends on your citizenship and where you live. If the answer to both is “not China”, what would you have to be afraid of?
If you piss them off enough they can kill you even if you’re in another country.
I seriously doubt China assassinates foreigners on foreign soil. They’re not America or even the USSR.
If China was assassinating foreigners in foreign countries, every lemmy user would hear about it, there’s multiple dedicated accounts that do nothing but post anti-chinese articles.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence etc.
Basing your international assassination evidence on lemmy posts, or lack there of, is hilarious.
It kinda is, since it implies chinese assassins either don’t exist or are so small and super-competent they haven’t left any evidence. Billions of people have phones and we don’t have footage of alien abductions or Bigfoot, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence
I think you’re being naive. Nobody can embarrass/piss off a world power then think their safe because they aren’t a citizen of that county.
China recently passed an amendment to their Cybersecurity law giving them more power to go after international hackers like this.
China could pay someone to track down the hacker and catch or kill them. I think they have a part of their government for that actually. Maybe they quietly put a bounty on their head. How is china going to prevent this person from continuing to hack them or teach others how to do it? This is a serious problem for whoever hacked them.
The Chinese government has been pretty careful about following the rules when dealing with other countries, largely out of a naive belief that if they follow them, other countries will treat them accordingly, not understanding international norms is just America playing Calvin ball.
See: China joining the WTO, followed by the US simply breaking the organization to prevent any rulings against itself, or China’s support for the Philippines and Indian governments instead of ideologically aligned communist movements, as if helping them stabilize themselves would benefit China in future dealings.
Alternativelly, they’ve just been competent in the execution of their less savory intelligence operations and thus not been caught doing something too outrageous.
It makes a lot more sense for China to arrange an “overdose” than shoot somebody in the middle of a busy street in broad daylight from a car with diplomatic plates and a Chinese flag.
Same for all other countries, by the way, though in Autocracies politicians have less to worry if the country ever gets caught murdering people in foreign soil than politicians in Democracies do (though, judging by a century of American murders, even those in supposed Democracies almost never have to worry about it)
Completely ignoring the stuff that’s been happening in the South China Sea and the Indian border huh?
Maybe, they are just more competent and their secret operations stay more secret
lol maybe, but given that America has immigrant populations from nearly every country, I would be shocked if another country managed to have a more effective spy network, though the USSR had a shot due to their support of internationalism. “There’s a Chinese assassin among us? That Chinese guy is kinda sus.”
Russia has no problem killing people in the UK.
DPRK has no problem killing people in Malaysia.
India has no problem killing people in Canada.
US has no problem killing people anywhere.
For all the despicable shit china does in the world the should leak it all for us to #@&! With
Leak them on the War Thunder forums, maybe Chinese tanks will get buffed next patch.
That’s… that’s a lot of hard drives. Or a lot of rented server space.
That’s many many weeks of downloading.
The numbers don’t make sense here. The monthly cost to store that sort in data is way more than what they are asking for here. Even if they somehow extracted it to drives they own its over a million dollars just in drives.
Maybe they’re counting on multiple buyers?
Edit: I guess more likely they’d just toss access to the buyer for the data, get paid, and bounce…
Yeah, exfiltrating 10 petabytes without anyone noticing seems quite weird
10 petabytes… Siphoned over months without detection.
Doubt. A stack of hard drives in a backpack still has the highest bandwidth.
Cool, now other countries can steal China’s IP and thus the circle of knowledge continues on.
