The war in Ukraine has been going on for almost two months now. During this period, on the DDoSecrets site hackers from all over the world have posted over 5.8 terabytes of Russian secrets. Hacktivists like Anonymous and the IT Army of Ukraine they stole millions of emails and files from Moscow and its allies. But most of the population he will never read them.
DDoSecrets publishes the Kremlin secrets, but the Russians don’t read them
The organization Distributed Denial of SecretsDDoSecrets for short, is a non-profit organization of “whistleblower”Which not only publishes Russian secrets. Born in 2018, considered the spiritual heirs of WikiLeaks (which after the arrest of Julian Assage is less dynamic), reach fame with the so-called BlueLeaks. Emails, messages and documents stolen from the American police after in 2020 during the protests for the death of George Floyd.
In the last two years they have been absorbed in the headlines for having published chey secrets of executives in the Caymansdocuments of recruiting neo-Nazi groups. But in the past couple of months, they have become the nerve center for publishing the documents stolen from the Kremlin and its allegeswe had.
The co-founder Emma Best has recently tweeted which DDoSecrets posted further 5,8 terabyte of secrets stolen from the Russians. And every day there are hundreds of thousands of emails from companies, investment groups, ministries and state companies close to the Kremlin.
A mountain of data
In the “Russia” category of DDoSecrets you will find a database of information that to define huge would be an understatement. Especially since in most cases they are emails or text documents: in the 6 TB of data on DDoSecrets there are millions of Russian secrets.
In volume it goes from 22MB that of the personal data of 120 thousand Russian soldiersthe allocated in Ukraine, ai 786GB subtracted from the Russian state TV and NB65beyond 900 thousand emails over the course of 20 years. But the documents also vary greatly by type. Let’s go to those stolen from energy company like Gazprom up to those of Russian Orthodox Church.
But while it collects information from Anonymous and other hacking groups, DDoSecrets takes no position. The member of the collective Lorax Horne he explained to The Verge that “people who have only heard about DDoSecrets in the last month may think we have taken a stand. But it really just depends on the data we receive. If we received data from the other party, we would still consider it for publication. Only that in the last period most of the datasets concern Russian entities ”.
The Russians will not read the secrets of DDoSecrets
Although the official position of DDoSecrets is simply to publish information about corrupt governments or companies, the antiwar sentiment it is perceived in the words and actions of the group. But not anti-Russian: indeed, the collective would like i citizens under the Moscow government could see the corruption of their own government. Anonymous is recruiting more and more hackers precisely because the Kremlin atrocities are motivating so many people.
But just because the information is online doesn’t mean it’s reachable. When last year i Pandora Papers have caused scandal all over the world, in Russia have hardly been mentioned by a few independent journalists. Corruption in the Kremlin is not news, because censorship would be quick to punish journalists who might report it.
With the onset of the conflict, government control of the media in Russia has seen an unprecedented tightening. Moscow has blocked Twitter and Facebook and internet access is complicated for the vast majority of citizens. If the most digitally enabled can use programs such as version Tor on Twitter, for most people it becomes impossible. Especially after Moscow blocked the services of VPN.
On the whole Earth there is no one who can read all of the Russian secret database of DDoSecrets, did not even live a geological era. But for journalists, analysts and foreign secret services, searching Russian data can become an interesting operation. However, almost none of these 5.8 TB of files will be able to reach Russian citizens.
Right now, Kremlin propaganda is the only source of information for a great many Russians. This explains why the80% of Russians claim to support the troops in this conflict in a recent poll. There has never been so much information, lots of evidence of Kremlin corruption online. Yet in Russia (almost) no one can read them.