Panic As China Hit By Massive Attack; China & Iran; US-China; China's Economy - China Update

[TexasTowelie]

00:00 Introduction
00:11 Alleged Hack of National Supercomputing Center
03:07 Iran War & China
07:05 Maritime Electrification
09:43 US-China: ASEAN Elite Opinion

The following summary is AI-generated.

- Massive cyber breach claim: A hacker alleges stealing 10+ petabytes of data from China’s National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, including defense simulations — potentially the largest breach ever, though authenticity remains unverified.

- Geopolitical ambiguity in Iran ceasefire: China may have quietly helped broker a fragile Iran ceasefire, but avoids public ownership; U.S. threatens 50% tariffs on countries supplying Iran, targeting Chinese dual-use tech ties.

- China’s maritime electrification push: Battery giant CATL is expanding into shipping, deploying systems on 900+ vessels and investing in battery-swapping tech to support decarbonization amid Middle East supply chain disruptions.

- Southeast Asia’s shifting alignment: A new survey shows 52% of regional elites would align with China over the U.S. if forced to choose — driven by concerns over U.S. political instability, not diminished American soft power.

- Strategic caution from China: Despite economic engagement in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Beijing avoids formal security commitments, preferring stability and transactional relationships over geopolitical entanglements.

- High-stakes tech vulnerability: The alleged Tianjin breach underscores how critical HPC infrastructure is to national security — and how cyber warfare is becoming central to great power competition.

[lapfog_1]

1. Fun with math

The claim is that someone stole 10PB of data from a Chinese Supercomputer Center.

I have some, ahem, small, experience with large data storage ( first person to build a multi-PB file system for NASA in the 1990s, first person to move one TB/sec while at Seagate over 12 years ago, etc ).

10PB of data is 11,258,999,068,426,240 8bit bytes... or 90,071,992,547,409,920 bits ( not including any message encapsulation via TCP/IP ).

Let's assume the hacker had access to a 100 Gbit link to this supercomputer site AND that no one would notice 100Gbit/sec transfer from this site to someplace remote. Dividing it out it would take almost 10 full days pulling data at 100Gbit/sec to capture all of the data, not to mention you would need a 10 PB data store to save it for later ( while possible these days with cheaper storage, it would still cost a lot of $$$ ).

Entirely possible if everyone was asleep at the wheel in the Chinese supercomputer center... but very unlikely. Not to mention at 100 Gbit/sec links and 10PB data stores are expensive.

I would rate this as very unlikely.

Of course, they might hide the transfer by using much smaller transfer rates, but then the opportunity for the operations staff to notice the transfer over 100 days or longer would be much higher.

Not to mention that that IF this data was detailed records of every person on earth right now ( 8.3 billion of us ) that this would represent over a megabyte of data, addresses, DOB, phone numbers, photos, etc on each and every person. You can capture a lot about someone with 1MB of storage... so this will more likely be raw data from instruments like particle accelerators, satellite images, etc. Most of which is not very useful to hackers.

Makes for a good headline and Petabyte is so large that it is hard for people to imagine what that really means.