Hackers claim they've breached a Chinese supercomputer and are demanding huge amounts of crypto for the data, but security researchers are sceptical

Earlier this year, dark web hackers claimed to have exfiltrated a huge amount of data from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin, China. The hacker group FlamingChina claims that it stole 10 petabytes of data pertaining to advanced science and defence agencies within China. However, a number of security researchers have since cast doubt on the leak's legitimacy.

As far as I can tell, NetAskari was the first to bring the data leak to wider attention back in February 2026 via X, before further delving into a sample of the leaked files on their SubStack.

According to them, a dark web forum user going by the handle 'airborneshark1' initially offered a sample of the full leak for $3,000 USD (in cryptocurrency, of course), before offering up all 10 petabytes to the highest bidder.

NetAskari was able to obtain a multi-gigabyte sample of the alleg...