At least some of the Pentagon’s top secret documents on the war in Ukraine were leaked on a private chat room on the platform Discord, according to the online intelligence site Bellingcat.
“After a brief spat with another person on the server about Minecraft Maps and the war in Ukraine, one of the Discord users replied, ‘here, have some leaked documents’ — attaching 10 documents about Ukraine, some of which bore the ‘Top Secret’ markings,” Bellingcat analyst Aric Toler wrote.
That user had found those documents on another Discord server
Other leaked documents were posted to a Discord server named “Thug Shaker Central” — perhaps as early as mid-January.
“Posts and channel listings show that the server’s users were interested in video games, music, Orthodox Christianity, and fandom for the popular YouTuber ‘Oxide,'” Toler wrote.
Related: Leak of Classified Documents on Ukraine, China, and the Middle East a ‘Nightmare’ Says Pentagon
Apparently, finding highly classified documents is easy on gamer sites.
The bizarre provenance of the leak may seem unusual but it is far from the first time that a dispute between gamers has sparked an intelligence breach, with the overlapping communities causing problems for military and gaming platforms alike.
The existence of the leaked cache was exposed as documents showing estimated casualties in the Bakhmut theatre of battle began circulating on public social networks last week.
Two versions of those documents, one of which had been crudely digitally altered to understate Russian casualties and overstate Ukrainian ones, were passed around among observers of the war. One, with the correct figures, stemmed from a leak to 4chan, the chaotic image board best known for birthing the “alt right” movement.
At the same time, a second set of documents, including the edited image, were being passed around pro-Russian Telegram channels.
So much for meeting in a dark alley with foreign agents to receive a package of secret documents. These days, just scan the message boards and chat rooms of video gamers and Lord knows what you’ll find.
Although the scale and sensitivity of the leaks are significant, this is not the first time that an intelligence breach has been traced back to an argument about video games. One game in particular, the vehicular combat simulation War Thunder, has become notorious for the sheer quantity of leaks linked to it.
The game, which has a reputation for accuracy, has 70 million players worldwide, leading to regular disputes about balance and accuracy – as a result, users have made breaches in at least 10 separate cases since 2020, frequently through posting classified documents about the capability of active weaponry in an effort to argue for the digital version of the vehicle to be improved.
Insane.
Maybe the Pentagon should hire some of these guys to improve our cyber security. If they can break in to steal fighter jet or tank specs, perhaps they can design ways to keep them secret.
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