They’ve leaked terabytes of Russian emails, but who’s reading?

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Photography by Mikhail Svetlov / Getty Images

The city of Blagoveshchensk is located in the far east of Russia, 3,500 miles from Moscow and still from Kyiv. The Chinese city of Heihe sprawls to the south, with the first Sino-Russian road bridge beside it.

The Blagoveshchensk City Administration's emails have been published online by the transparency collective distributed denial of secrets, just one of many data sets leaked to the organization.

The war in Ukraine has caused an unprecedented amount of leaks from the country. DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best said on April 20th that the collective has published 5.8 terabytes of leaks since the invasion started.

On that day, DDoSecrets published two new leaked email cache: 575,000 emails from property management company Sawatzky and 250,000 emails from a Moscow-based investment firm.

The leaks now include banks, oil and gas companies, and the Russian Orthodox Church. The Blagoveshchensk emails are a small leak compared to the other leaked content. A list of the personal details for 120,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine is the smallest data set at 22MB, while the largest is .

I don't think people fully appreciate just how much, after invading Ukraine, people are hacking Russia. There are multiple hacks a week and it's only increasing. For first time in internet history Russia is fair game for cyber attacks, and this is what it looks like

— Micah (@micahflee) April 19, 2022

Even though DDoSecrets isn't explicitly trying to publish information that is coming out of Russia, it is the most active place to host leaks.

For people who haven't heard of DDoSecrets before last month, they can be forgiven. If we were getting data from the other side, we would consider it for publication. Most of the data coming out are related to Russian entities.

It's hard to deny that many of the DDoSecret's leaks are motivated by antiwar sentiment. In an interview with NBC News, Emma Best described hacktivists who leak to the collective as "screaming in response to the injustice of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the inhumanity of the war crimes committed by the invaders." The moral clarity that comes with direction from the Ukrainian government is one of the things that other experts point to.

The organization has been described as a successor to the leak-sharing platform, which seems to have fallen into disarray in the years since the founder's arrest. As the conflict began, almost all of the site's channels for submitting documents were found to be inoperative, making it impossible to share leaks with the original transparency platform.

DDoSecrets has been given a new strategic role, which is to operate as a front-end distribution system for the fruits of hacktivist activity against Russia.

Traditional hackers were never looked upon fondly from law enforcement or members of the security community, but it seems they have received a free pass in the current conflict to attack all things Russian.

It's not clear that this is the world we live in, as the more chronically online among us might long for a world where sharing data can turn the tide of a war.

Got a hold of the VGTRK mega-leak. Will post findings/interesting bits in this thread as I go through it (could take a very, very long time).

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) April 5, 2022

If ordinary Russians had access to the leaked data, they could look through the archives for evidence of the elite corruption that is still endemic to the country. With the information environment in the country being more tightly controlled by the government, it is unlikely that the vast majority of the leaked information will ever be seen by the public.

The suppression of independent media in Russia is a likely factor in limiting the impact of incriminating information contained in the recent leaks, according to the head of the information manipulation research team at the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

They pointed to clear corruption at very high levels within the Kremlin and it didn't really create a ripple domestically in Russia because it wasn't covered. The limited impact that had domestically probably won't happen this time around, because independent media has been stifled even further.

Since the invasion began, there has been a decline in internet freedom in Russia. Even though some younger, digitally savvy Russians might be able to circumvent some of these measures, the upshot is that even digital news is increasingly Kremlin-approved.

Changing the Russian public's understanding of the invasion will be necessary in order to bring the country back into the international order. There are leak sites that could play a role in this, but so will diplomacy and other measures to support the eventual rebuilding of an independent media.

Even if the end is here, we can come out the other side with 70 percent of Russians thinking that the war was not a war.