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?!
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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Where do you even store 10 PB of data?
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.
Social engineering and Sneakernet
Sneakernet? More like forktrucknet
You could probably spread the exfil across a botnet of some kind, since I imagine the data will survive being chunked.
Minivan full of usb keys. Probably still the fastest data transfer method too.
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.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a uhaul truck"
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
how did they transfer 10PB with no one noticing
Siphoning. Really slowly.
Tricked it out. Naw mean?
Hackers must have insane S3 bills
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
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.
They're selling those on AliExpress
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
How do you carry away petabytes?
Just compress it with PiedPiper
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.
Did it supposed to stop “be”? Or did OP hit the enter too soon?
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
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😆
Tape storage is probably even cheaper and more space efficient
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.
$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