10 petabytes of sensitive data stolen from China's National Supercomputing Center, hackers claim — daring heist would be largest ever China hack, covering 6,000 clients across science, defense, and be

On your fidget spinner usb drive from a trade show

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.

Minivan full of usb keys. Probably still the fastest data transfer method too.

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

Hackers must have insane S3 bills

They're selling those on AliExpress

Tapes

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 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

Just compress it with PiedPiper

They paid for WinZip

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.

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😆

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.