India, April 9 --  It was sometime in the middle to late months of 2025 when a hacker, later known publicly under the alias FlamingChina, first slipped into the systems of China's National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin. The facility, one of the country's most important high-performance computing hubs, quietly supported thousands of research projects for universities, scientific institutes, and defence-related organisations working on everything from aerospace designs to advanced military simulations. 

Using a compromised VPN domain as the entry point, the intruder moved carefully, avoiding any dramatic actions that might raise alarms in the multi-user environment, where network segmentation was weaker than expected.

 I...