Distributed Denial of Secrets
Distributed Denial of Secrets, abbreviated DDoSecrets, is a nonprofit whistleblower site founded in 2018 for news leaks. The site is a frequent source for other news outlets and has worked on investigations including Cyprus Confidential with other media organizations. In December 2023, the organization said it had published over 100 million files from 59 countries.
Sometimes called a successor to WikiLeaks, it came to international attention for its June 2020 publication of internal US police documents, known as BlueLeaks. The group has also published data on Russian oligarchs, fascist groups, shell companies, tax havens and banking in the Cayman Islands, as well as data scraped from Parler in January 2021 and from the February 2021 Gab leak. The group is also known for publishing emails from military officials, City Hall in Chicago and the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.
The site's leaks have resulted in or contributed to multiple government investigations, including the second impeachment of President Donald Trump. During the Russo-Ukrainian War, it was considered one of the best public repositories of all the Russian files leaked since the invasion began.
History
Distributed Denial of Secrets was founded by Emma Best, an American national security reporter known for filing prolific freedom of information requests, and Thomas White, an administrator of the Silk Road 2.0. At its public launch in December 2018, the site held more than a terabyte of data from many of the highest-profile leaks. The site originally considered making all of the data public, but after feedback made some of it available only to journalists and researchers.Best has served as a public face of the group, which lists its members. In February 2019, they told Columbia Journalism Review that fewer than 20 people worked on the project. According to Best, several early members of the project were driven to radical transparency work by their past background with the state, which they compared to Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers. Best said, "Those associations all ended well prior to DDoSecrets coming together and were internally disclosed early on." In April 2021, the website listed 10 members and advisors.
In December 2019, Distributed Denial of Secrets announced its collaboration with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. In May 2020, DDoSecrets partnered with European Investigative Collaborations and the Henri-Nannen-Journalistenschule journalism school.
In December 2020, the group announced its affiliation with Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
In January 2024, DDoSecrets launched the Greenhouse Project to preserve censored information and create a "warming effect to reverse the chilling effects of censorship" as part of its broader mission to ensure the free transmission of data in the public interest by making itself a "publisher of last resort". In June 2024, DDoSecrets' revamped their website and in July, DDoSecrets launched two new projects, the Library of Leaks and Disclosure Without Borders. The Library of Leaks focuses on preserving existing data and coordinating with outside groups and Disclosure Without Borders focuses on new publications and source protections.
Responses
DDoSecrets and the people behind the project have been described by Wired as a "transparency collective of data activists" and a successor to WikiLeaks, by the Congressional Research Service, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Human Rights Watch and The Nation as a "transparency collective", by The Hill as a "leaktivist collective", by Columbia Journalism Review as a "journalist collective", by Brookings Institution as "a WikiLeaks-style journalist collective," by the New York Times as a "watchdog group", and Business Insider as a "freedom-of-information advocacy group", as an "alternative to WikiLeaks" by Columbia Journalism Review, Krebs On Security, ZDNet, and Forbes, and as "the most influential leaking organization on the internet" by VICE News."Government responses
In 2019, the Congressional Research Service recognized Distributed Denial of Secrets as a transparency collective. In December 2019, politicians in Sweden and the UK, including anti-corruption chief John Penrose said that leaks published by Distributed Denial of Secrets showed the need for reforms on company creation and registration. That month, Belgian tax authorities initiated an investigation based on data published by DDoSecrets the prior month.In 2020, the U.S. counterintelligence strategy described leaktivists and public disclosure organizations like Distributed Denial of Secrets as "significant threats," alongside five countries, three terrorist groups, and "transnational criminal organizations." A June 2020 bulletin created by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis erroneously described them as a "criminal hacker group". Elements of the report were challenged as inaccurate by DDoSecrets and media such as The Verge. On July 3, German authorities seized a public server used by Distributed Denial of Secrets at the request of the US government. The same month, the Internal Revenue Service recognized the group as a 501 non-profit.
In 2021, legislators in Maine introduced a bill to close the state's fusion center in response to BlueLeaks and whistleblower reports.
In 2022, law enforcement agencies in New York, New Jersey, Washington and Oregon launched investigations into officers who appeared in the leaked Oath Keepers records published by DDoSecrets.
In November 2023, governments including Cyprus president Nikos Christodoulides and European lawmakers began responding to the Cyprus Confidential findings in less than 24 hours after it was released, calling for a crackdown on financial corruption and launching criminal probes into allegations of money laundering. According to Emma Best, the Department of Defense asked DDoSecrets to remove the 2022–2023 Pentagon document leaks, but DDoSecrets "basically just ignored them".
Censorship
In June 2020, the organization was banned from Twitter in response to BlueLeaks, citing a breach of their policies against "distribution of hacked material" in a move that was criticized as setting a "dangerous precedent." In September 2023, The Intercept reported that access to the organization's website was blocked by Indonesia and Russia and censored by Twitter and Reddit. In 2024, they refused a take down letter from Brainstack over data from their spyware company, mSpy. A Telegram channel operated by the group was closed without notice after publishing data from Israel's Ministry of Justice.DDoSecrets published about one million emails from the Mineral Resources Authority of Papua New Guinea in February 2025, leading to attempts of censorship. Hamilton Vagi, head of the National Cyber Security Centre of Papua New Guinea, sent a threatening letter to DDoSecrets demanding immediate removal of the material. The attempt ultimately drew more attention to the MRA emails, invoking the Streisand effect.
Publications
, the site hosts dozens of terabytes of data from over 200 organizations. In December 2023, the organization said it had published over 100 million files from 59 countries. The group has said it uses "a mixed distribution model, publishing information both to the general public and restricting some information to journalists and researchers when there's a lot of sensitive information."2018
In December 2018, DDoSecrets listed a leak from Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs, portions of which detailed the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine at a time when the Kremlin was denying a military presence there. About half of the material from that leak was published in 2014; the other half emerged in 2016. WikiLeaks reportedly rejected a request to host the full cache of files in 2016.2019
In January 2019, DDoSecrets published hundreds of gigabytes of hacked Russian documents and emails from pro-Kremlin journalists, oligarchs, and militias.In November 2019, DDoSecrets published over 2 terabytes of data from the Cayman National Bank and Trust. The files were provided by the hacktivist known as Phineas Fisher, and included lists of the bank's politically exposed clients. The leak was used by researchers to study how elites use offshore banking.
In December 2019, DDoSecrets published "#29 Leaks" in partnership with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and more than 20 outlets in 18 countries. The 450 gigabytes of data came from Formations House, a "company mill" which registered and operated companies for clients included organized crime groups, state-owned oil companies, and fraudulent banks. The release was compared to both the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers. Belgian tax authorities initiated an investigation based on the Cayman bank and Formations House leaks.
In December 2019, DDoSecrets published "PacoLeaks" and "MilicoLeaks": data from Chilean military police and military. PacoLeaks revealed police personnel data, extensive police files on activist groups and leaders, and evidence that the police had infiltrated activist groups MilicoLeaks included details on Chilean army intelligence, including operations, finance and international relations.
2020
In 2020, DDoSecrets published a copy of the Bahamas corporate registry. DDoSecrets partnered with European Investigative Collaborations and the German Henri-Nannen-Schule journalism school to create the Tax Evader Radar, a project to review the dataset of almost one million documents. The project exposed the offshore holdings of prominent Germans, the tax activities of ExxonMobil, as well as offshore business entities belonging to the DeVos and Prince families.In March 2020, DDoSecrets published 156 gigabytes of data hacked from the Myanmar Investment Commission. The leak also revealed how millions of dollars allegedly flowed from Mytel subscribers to Myanmar military generals, and exposed business dealings of family members of prominent military leaders.
In April 2020, DDoSecrets published almost 10million messages from more than 100 Discord servers used by neo-Nazi and QAnon conspiracy theorist groups. The leaked chats showed threats of violence and attempts to influence the 2018 United States midterm elections.
On June 19, 2020, DDoSecrets released BlueLeaks, which consisted of 269 gigabytes of internal U.S. law enforcement data obtained from fusion centers by the hacker collective Anonymous. DDoSecrets called it the "largest published hack of American law enforcement agencies." Betsy Reed described BlueLeaks as the U.S. law enforcement equivalent to the Pentagon Papers.
In July 2020, DDoSecrets released documents relating to the United States' case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The release also included chat logs and letters between Assange and various sources.