What is Wikileaks up to?

David Heath
Thursday, 01 September 2011 14:14

Business IT - Security

The trickle of cables has become a flood and there's a new encrypted file on the loose.

For some months we have been seeing a trickle of US embassy cables finding their way onto the Wikileaks 'cablegate' site, however in the past few days the trickle has become an absolute flood.

Seemingly, the reason for this deluge is the realisation that the password to the widely distributed file Insurance.aes256 (which was generally assumed to be the full Cablegate package) has been in plain sight since February this year.

And it was a comedy of errors which led to the release.

A book by Investigations Editor, David Leigh of The Guardian, "Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy" offered up what was thought to be a temporary password to a unique copy of the cables archive.  Leigh explained that the inclusion of this password in the book was a simple "throw-away" fact.

Unfortunately, it was the real password to the actual archive.  Thus meaning that the full unredacted set of cables is now in public view.  Reports suggest that once Wikileaks was aware of the issue, they conducted a very long phone conversation with the US State Department to warn them of the exposure of sensitive names in the hope that people could be protected.

As of writing, almost 144,000 out of the 251,287 cables have been published on the cablegate site and it would be reasonable to expect the remainder will be published in the next few hours or days.  Already, many new leaks are being picked over by the world's press.

Hackers (or perhaps various Governments) responded to the release by targeting Wikileaks with an extended denial-of-service attack.  This seems to have now stopped as iTWire had no difficulty in accessing various Wikileaks sites and pages.

This of course brings us to the second intriguing point.