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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?!
Where do you even store 10 PB of data?
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
On your fidget spinner usb drive from a trade show
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.
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
how do you exfiltrate that much data without anyone noticing?
and dude wanted some puny change for it, like a million bucks or something lol.
How do you carry away petabytes?
Just compress it with PiedPiper
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😆
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
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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