Distributed Denial of Secrets

Distributed Denial of Secrets
Website type
Document archive and disclosure
Available inEnglish, but the source documents are in their original language
Founder
IndustryJournalism
Website
CommercialNo
RegistrationNone
LaunchedDecember 3, 2018; 7 years ago (2018-12-03)
Current statusOnline

Distributed Denial of Secrets, abbreviated DDoSecrets, is a website founded in 2018 for news leaks. The site's team 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 reporter, and Thomas White, an administrator of the Silk Road 2.0.[better source needed] 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 January 2026, DDoSecrets announced that their website address had changed to a .org top-level domain. The change happened because their original .com domain was not automatically renewed due to incorrect contact information with the domain registrar. DDoSecrets advised users to update any .com links to the new .org address, as the old domain was no longer under their control and is illegitimate.

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 (IRS) recognized the group as a 501(c)(3) 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 (MRA) 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.

See also