
WikiLeaks Has Morphed from Journalism Hotshot to Malware Hub - steven
https://backchannel.com/wikileaks-has-morphed-from-journalism-hotshot-to-malware-hub-1bdd68cc560
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ddt_Osprey
Boy, just like so many MP3 sharing services of yester-year. What a curious
development!

Standard practice to poison the well of your enemies.

This is a phased approach by the way, and malware is a preliminary step. Next
come reputation smearing forms of pornography, and hardware destroying
payloads for the ones that have no reputation to smear.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
That's what I thought, too, when I just read the headline. But on reading the
article, it becomes clear that they're just insufficiently curating the files
they're distributing.

What should happen if some corrupt official's email contains a malware
attachment? There is some value in not curating the data - it would be good to
know if they responded to a social engineering attack, for example. Perhaps a
payload reveals that some other government got into their email years ago, and
has been blackmailing them?

Similarly, it would be informative to find that someone was using email to
share pornography of themselves, especially if that pornography was blackmail
material, but there ought to be some curation.

~~~
ddt_Osprey
Oh, clickbait. Nevermind.

I suppose maybe this identifies the polarity of backchannel.com's political
alignment.

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ungzd
"Spam" folder in my Gmail account contains lots of malware too. It means
Google is evil and gmail is designed to spread malware.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Clearly Google is not evil for having malware in your spam folder. But it
would be unethical to post the contents of your email account, expecting
people to download and inspect the email in a context where they could be
infected by the malware in your spam folder, without at least a warning that
it contained viruses.

I think the best resolution would be to post the contents of non-spam mailbox
folders with a warning that some attachments may contain viruses, or scrub
attachments. Post the spam folder and suspicious attachments separately, most
people aren't interested in that part of the email archive. This would save
bandwidth and prevent users from becoming infected. The small risk that
something important in the spam folder is missed is outweighed by these
benefits, IMO.

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siegecraft
I see this cites the 'Turkish women were exposed' meme, rebuttal here
([https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/08/08/what-a-hit-piece-
aga...](https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/08/08/what-a-hit-piece-against-
wikileaks-looks-like/)) but really all you had to do was see Conde Nast at the
top and you could predict the tenor of the piece..

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robert_foss
I would highly doubt that Wikileaks is serving malware.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
They're not, they're serving email databases, which contain spam which
contains malware:

> Bulgarian security expert Vesselin Bontchev ... figured that the average
> email database is likely to contain some harmful attachments, and that
> casual WikiLeaks visitors might now be endangered. His hunch was right, and
> he quickly uncovered a collection of malware...

~~~
Senji
>and that casual WikiLeaks visitors might now be endangered

The horror.

