'Only the tip of the iceberg': Pentagon leaks traced to Discord, a gamer-centric chat app

Researchers have traced a major leak of U.S. classified documents about the war between Ukraine and Russia to a gamer-centric chat app called Discord, Bellingcat and the Associated Press reported.

"We don't know. We truly don't know," National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told reporters Monday on whether the leaks present an ongoing threat.

Kirby said the the Department of Defense has referred the matter to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation. He added that President Biden was briefed late last week on the leaks and had stayed in contact with national security officials over the weekend.

Discord is a chat app popular with gamers but is used by a wide variety of other communities, like bird watchers, fans of television shows, and even college professors holding classes. The platform offers chat, voice, and video channels.

Aric Toler, Director of Training and Research at Bellingcat, traced ten documents with "Top Secret" markings about Ukraine to a Discord server called "Minecraft Earth Map" posted March 4. He says that leak was spurred by a spat between users, one of whom attached the bevy of documents, apparently to win an argument.

Bellingcat is "independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists brought together by a passion for open source research" founded in 2014.

Seven items from the ten-document trove on the Minecraft Earth Map server later appeared on 4chan and Telegram.

Tracing even further back in time, Toler notes that on March 1 and March 2, more than 30 documents were posted to another Discord server called WowMao. Though he had seen those posts, he could not independently verify their authenticity.

Stepping back in time for a final time, posts in the same style and formatting as those posted to Discord's WowMao server apparently also appeared on a now-deleted server called Thug Shaker Central January 13. Toler also could not independently verify the authenticity of these posts.

The Thug Shaker Central document screenshots were reportedly provided to him by members of the Thug Shaker Central community in the form of intentionally blurred screenshots. Those who provided the screenshots told Toler the files leaked to WowMao were only "the tip of the iceberg" compared to the material shared on Thug Shaker Central.

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