The latest leak of classified documents, which apparently disclosed information about the U.S. assessment of the Russia-Ukraine war as well as intel on how America may be spying on both adversaries and allies, was first identified on Discord servers, according to reports.
Photographs of dozens of pages of the documents were shared on Feb. 28 and March 2 on Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers, to a server called “WowMao,” The Washington Post reported.
The channel, seemingly named after a YouTuber’s account, though may not have been the first Discord channel where the documents spread, according to the open source intelligence research firm Bellingcat.
Members of a separate Discord community told Bellingcat the images were among a larger set of photos of documents posted to a since-deleted server on Discord dating back to January, said Bellingcat’s director of research and training Aric Toler. However, Bellingcat was not able to independently verify claims of those earlier documents.
After the photos were shared to the WowMao server, some were shared on another server about the popular video game Minecraft, Toler said.
From the hundreds of documents first shared on Discord, the photos were filtered down to dozens posted on the other servers, to a handful shared on 4chan and Telegram last week, Toler said.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
