this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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[–] XLE@piefed.social 53 points 1 month ago

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?!

whoa.

[–] gressen@lemmy.zip 24 points 1 month ago (9 children)

Where do you even store 10 PB of data?

[–] xSikes@feddit.online 20 points 1 month ago

On your fidget spinner usb drive from a trade show

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 14 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Telodzrum@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Social engineering and Sneakernet

[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 month ago

Sneakernet? More like forktrucknet

[–] PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago

You could probably spread the exfil across a botnet of some kind, since I imagine the data will survive being chunked.

[–] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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

[–] sudoMakeUser@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 1 points 1 month ago

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a uhaul truck"

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago

how did they transfer 10PB with no one noticing

Siphoning. Really slowly.

Tricked it out. Naw mean?

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Hackers must have insane S3 bills

[–] slowtrain33@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago

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

[–] silverneedle@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago
[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] 5PACEBAR@piefed.ca 3 points 1 month ago

They're selling those on AliExpress

[–] Kissaki@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago

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

[–] Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

How do you carry away petabytes?

[–] GalacticSushi@piefed.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 month ago

Just compress it with PiedPiper

[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 weeks ago

They paid for WinZip

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.

[–] Asfalttikyntaja@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

Did it supposed to stop “be”? Or did OP hit the enter too soon?

[–] thisbenzingring@lemmy.today -2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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

[–] bright@piefed.social 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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😆

[–] silverneedle@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

Tape storage is probably even cheaper and more space efficient

[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 6 points 1 month ago

$242k AUD if using the bare minimum number of HP 14TB enterprise drives (cheapest I can currently find)

Throw in some redundancy and call it $250k AUD or $179k USD