If you’ve been following the ongoing Ukraine War closely, you’ve probably heard of classified US documents about the war from the Pentagon that have been leaked online, and it’s gotten the economic and military powerhouse scrambling to find and plug the source of the leak. As of this publication, it has reason to believe that the first publication of the documents were made on a server on Discord.
According to the open-source research collective, Bellingcat, the US government believes that the leaked documents were first posted on a Minecraft server of the popular instant messaging and VoIP app, and that these documents were posted there as early as January. Over the course of the following months, Discord users whom follow this particular server say that more of the documents would continuously be leaked in it. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for those leaked documents to make their way onto 4chan.
Discord is, in many ways, one of the greatest messaging and social networking apps that came out in the last decade. Virtually anyone can sign up and create their own private servers, where individuals that are a part of the service can freely share content and opinions over text, voice, or even video. Not only that, but all servers created have no restrictions on the number of file uploads and downloads, and again, anything and everything goes, depending on the restrictions that the administrator of said server sets.
It’s not just the US Pentagon’s leaked documents that made their way onto Discord either. In the gaming scene, the messaging app was subpoenaed by Nintendo because the company wanted to find the individual who leaked more than 200 pages of an art book from the upcoming Legend of Zelda: Tears of a Kingdom on Discord.
The case of leaked US Pentagon documents is also the most potentially devastating, and could even be more impactful than those leaked by Edward Snowden back in 2013. Alleged content from the highly classified documents reportedly included references to Russian and Chinese activities, and about how the current war in Ukraine has drawn the latter country into helping the former. Not only that, the leaked documents also seemingly point to the US spying on allied countries, including South Korea and Israel.
There’s also a portion of the leaked documents that point at US and NATO countries already having their own special forces groups on the ground in Ukraine, although whether they are there for in a deniable operations capacity or if there are there to provide assistance and advanced training to Ukrainian troops is still unclear. If there are Western troops on the ground in Ukraine, though, then that could give Russia cause to escalate its aggression against those involved in a war that Putin launched without any instigation.
The US Department of Defense (DOD) says that it is actively reviewing the matter. It is unclear if and when the department will be able to isolate the source of the leak, but suffice to say, Discord could be getting the banhammer on all devices with the department’s purview.
(Source: Hot Hardware, Bellingcat, WSJ (Paywall), Kotaku, CNN)
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