Wikileaks: Russia Could Now Spy On Anyone Who Reads Wikileaks Site, Report Says
On Monday, The Inquisitr reported on the recent discovery that Wikileaks last year began hosting at least parts of its website on servers based in Moscow, Russia. Now, a new online report has revealed that the Russian server hosting could have grave consequences not only for United States national security, but for leakers not linked to the Russian government who transmit documents to Wikileaks whose identities could now be compromised — and for anyone who even reads Wikileaks documents online.
Read the full report on the Russian hosting of Wikileaks, by the independent investigative news site Patribotics, by clicking on this link.
To see previous Inquisitr reporting on Wikileaks, including Monday’s story on the Russian server hosting, click on the links in the “More Coverage” box, below on this page.
While Wikileaks has multiple servers, on September 30 of last year — about one week before Wikileaks began publishing stolen emails from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman John Podesta — the document-leaking site opened two new servers hosted by Peter Chayanov, whose service has previously hosted other hacking groups and email spammers.
In a report published by the Director of National Intelligence in January, the U.S. concluded that those hacks and other covert cyber-operations were carried out by Russia and ordered directly by Russian president Vladimir Putin for the purpose of tilting the 2016 Presidential Election to Donald Trump.
According to tech expert Laurelai Bailey who authored the original article exposing the Wikileaks Russian server hosts, with access to the physical server, the Russian government could program those computers to “sniff” Wikileaks traffic. In other words, to monitor and collect information about anyone who accesses a Wikileaks document online.
Leakers who pass documents to Wikileaks could also have their cover blown, as their identities could theoretically become known to the Russian government, leaving the leakers open to blackmail — meaning that Russia could now use Wikileaks not only as an outlet for publishing hacked documents, such as those stolen from Podesta or, earlier, the Democratic National Committee, but as a tool for recruiting spies and “moles.”
“Through Julian Assange and his website, it appears that the Russian hacker and his government can track any readers of the Wikileaks site and any donors of material to it, thus allowing Russia to ‘blackmail’ anyone who ‘sent secrets’ to Wikileaks as a ‘whistleblower,'” wrote Patribiotics author Louise Mensch, an independent journalist and former Conservative member of the British Parliament.
Through Chayanov, who the Patribiotics site alleges is “connected to Vladimir Putin and operated with the blessing of Putin’s government,” Russian intelligence services now have access to all web traffic in and out of the Wikileaks servers, Mensch wrote.
“It is not a fact that Russia did indeed monitor web traffic to Wikileaks, but it seems to be an absolute fact that if they want to, they can – and it seems, from the reaction of Mr. Chayanov upon being outed, almost totally certain that Julian Assange handed Russia the keys to the Wikileaks site deliberately,” Mensch wrote.
MORE WIKILEAKS COVERAGE FROM THE INQUISITR
Wikileaks Russia Link Revealed: Site Hosted In Russia, Hacking Suspect Named
Trump WikiLeaks Collusion Seen As Farage, Stone Make Contact With Julian Assange
WikiLeaks Julian Assange And The Trump Russia Link: 5 Facts You Should Know About Figure At Center Of Scandal
WikiLeaks Posts Rape Victims’ Medical Info As Jill Stein Pens Op-Ed Praising ‘Hero’ Julian Assange
WikiLeaks: Julian Assange Off The Hook Because Hillary Clinton Was Not Prosecuted, Lawyer Tells DOJ
WikiLeaks Julian Assange And White Nationalism: Trump Campaign Support Not First Time Assange Has Backed ‘Alt-Right’
Hillary Clinton Indicted Over WikiLeaks? Julian Assange May Not Have ‘Evidence’ Against Clinton After All, Report Says
WikiLeaks In Turkey Doxxes Almost Every Woman In The Country After Failed Coup — Lives Now In Danger, Experts Fear
New Donald Trump Russia Hacker Scandal: Putin Agents Hit Private Email Of Trump’s Political Enemies, Report Says
According to intelligence experts, Russia and Wikileaks are now colluding in a disinformation campaign to spread doubt about whether Russia was behind the election hacking campaign last year. The recent release of CIA documents, followed by a flood of Twitter postings stating incorrectly that the CIA leaks show that the CIA itself, not Russia, was behind the hacks, is key to that disinformation campaign.
“The big story here is, if you were actually trying to undermine a very specific claim that was made by every single one of the U.S. intelligence agencies and corroborated by all of their foreign counterparts, this is how you might do that,” private cybersecurity specialist Ryan Kalember told the Washington publication The Hill. “It wasn’t even subtle. They made memes about it.”
[Featured Images By Peter Macdiarmid, Andreas Rentz/Getty Images]
