Cyberactivists have announced the release of a massive archive with leaked information from Russian oligarchs and journalists
According to network security and ethical
hacking specialists from the International Institute of Cyber Security, a website
has announced that it will soon reveals hundreds of thousands of emails leaked
from Russian oligarchs and communist supporters, in the same way that the WikiLeaks
platform does, although Julian Assange has never leaked information from this
country.
Distributed Denial of Secrets, the site that has announced the leaking, was founded just a couple of months ago by transparency cyberactivists. Emma Best, founder of the site, says that the site will host hacked materials very difficult to find or that even has already disappeared of the web.
“On the site you will find information on
politicians, businessmen, journalists, the religious elite, nationalist and
separatist groups, even terrorists operating abroad,” says Best, journalist
specializing in national security. “Leaked information includes emails, Skype
and Facebook messages, as well as thousands of documents.”
Distributed Denial of Secrets is a newly
launched collaborative effort founded with the aim of providing journalists
with a central source of information, mentioned experts in network
security. As an advance, the site already shows leaked information from
the Ministry of the Interior in Russia, where details of Russian military
deployment in Ukraine are mentioned; the administrators of Distributed Denial
of Secrets claim that WikiLeaks refused to host much of the information that
could be found on this site.
On the other hand, the network security expert
Nicholas Weaver of the University of California says: “WikiLeaks’ main task is
to organize and publish information available on other platforms. Although
Assange has never been involved with information from Russia”, mentions the
expert.
The Distributed Denial of Secrets project has
gathered over 200k emails in a spreadsheet to facilitate searches for
stakeholders. In total, its database has about 175 GB, an amount higher than
that leaked by Russian hackers during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The site database includes information related
to relevant Russian characters, such as Alezander Budberg, a well-known
columnist, Kirill Frolov, deputy director of the CIS Institute, and Vladislav
Surkov, a man close to Vladimir Putin. In the case of Surkov, his files contain
details of the Kremlin’s covert campaign in favor of the Ukrainian separatists;
although the Russian government claimed that these evidences had been
falsified, subsequent forensic analyses proved their veracity.
At a time when leaks of sensitive information
have become almost a competitive activity between nations and activists, the
interested people have to act carefully about possible hoaxes or intentionally
manipulated information. This project has tried to mitigate these risks in the
same way as WikiLeaks: Verifying the cryptographic signatures added by the server,
so that Distributed Denial of Secrets does not store information without
verifying its authenticity.
Despite the fact that the project is still very
young, Best claims that they have already faced reprisals, probably on the part
of the actors involved. In a moment, while maintaining the site, the managers
detected some attempts to cyber, which reacted immediately. “We made some
changes, sent copies of our databases to multiple servers and organized secure
offline storage along with a third party,” said Best. “Although we have failed
to identify more potential security incidents, we decided to take precautions”.
