The Great Firewall Leaks: A 600GB Trove of Secrets Exposed

China’s Great Firewall has suffered what researchers describe as the largest data breach in its history, with nearly 600GB of files leaked. The trove includes source code, internal communications, work documents and complete server images, offering for the first time a comprehensive engineering view of how the censorship infrastructure operates.

The leak is believed to have originated from the core development teams behind the Great Firewall, including Geedge Networks and the MESA Lab under the Institute of Information Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. GFW Report described the incident as the largest data leak in the history of the Great Firewall, and notes it remains unclear whether it resulted from insider leaks or external intrusion.

The files are available via BitTorrent and HTTPS mirrors, with the largest archive, repo[.]tar, weighing 500GB and containing a complete RPM-packaged server image. The documents also reference projects in Myanmar, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Kazakhstan, illustrating how Chinese censorship technology is packaged and exported as a commercialised service for various clients.