Distributed Denial of Secrets is a transparency collective with an unusual mission in the age of PeakTwitter: “avoid political, corporate or personal leanings.”
They say they don’t do hacking but they have posted the result of a hack a trove of 230,000 emails from Russia’s Ministry of Culture. DDOSecrets lives on the so-called Dark Web, where communications can be anonymized.
DDoSecrets first made news in January 2019 with a trove of documents dubbed “The Dark Side of the Kremlin.” As the Daily Beast reported
The collection includes files from Alexander Budberg, a Russian columnist married to Dmitry Medvedev’s press secretary; Kirill Frolov, vice-director of the Kremlin-backed Institute for CIS Countries; and Vladislav Surkov, a top aide to Vladimir Putin who was hacked by CyberHunta in October 2016. The Surkov files contained documentary evidence of the Kremlin’s covert coordination with pro-Russia separatists within Ukraine, and though the Kremlin denounced the leak as a fake, several independent forensics examiners agreed the emails were the real deal.
The Russian Cultural Ministry seems to a softer target and there’s no indication the information has been vetted to remove personal information of private citizens.
Is this necessary cyberwar against a tyrannical regime? Or defensible freedom of information for the people? Or an unwarranted invasion of privacy? You be the judge.
Here is DDO Secrets credo:
We aim to avoid political, corporate or personal leanings, to act as a beacon of available information. As a transparency collective, we don’t support any cause, idea or message beyond ensuring that information is available to those who need it most—the people.
Source: Distributed Denial of Secrets
