This hack comes roughly 5 years after the massive 2021 "hack." The reason I am on the fence about it being a hack is that this online database containing roughly 1 billion Chinese citizens was left unsecured and publicly accessible for over a year before an anonymous user on a hacker forum offered to sell the data, drawing widespread attention to the cybersecurity incident. It marked a rare occurrence as well, where the Chinese government had to admit to the massive leak.

This time around, using a compromised VPN domain, the hacker alleges he was able to access the computer and deploy a bot farm that ran for 6 months, slowly siphoning off data. Experts who have reviewed the preview have stated that there are no signs that this is not genuine, as everything tracks with what you would expect to see at a supercomputing center. Known data in the preview included highly classified defense documents and missile schematics.

If this all checks out, this will be a huge and embarrassing event for China. One of the recurring things I have seen mentioned by experts is that since this was done with relative ease, does that mean that other state intelligence agencies already have the same data from doing roughly the same thing?