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Wikileaks issues malware claiming it is Turkish expose

by on16 August 2016


Looks like this cache is not up to much either

Julian Assange’s Wikileaks is getting so desperate for attention that it is releasing malware claiming that it contains emails from Turkey's ruling AKP political party.

Assange has been attempting to show the world that the outfit is still relevant by publishing email troves. However they have been ending rather badly with one cache coming from President Putin’s hacker collective and now these new Turkish emails being packed with malware.

Writing in Github, security expert Vesselin Bontchev found most of the malware came from "run-of-the-mill" spam and phishing emails which had been found in the dump.

While WikiLeaks has claimed the emails shed light on corruption within the Turkish government, however it is fairly clear that Assange did not read what was in the cache before releasing it. New York

Times reporter Zeynep Tufekci has pointed out that the materials have little to do with Turkish politics and mostly appear to be mailing lists and spam.

This is the second time that Wackyleaks has stuffed up a Turkish release. In July, WikiLeaks also came under fire for publishing "private, sensitive information of what appears to be every female voter in 79 out of 81 provinces in Turkey," including some home addresses and phone numbers, immediately after a bloody coup attempted to overthrow the AKP.

WikiLeaks claimed more than 1,400 emails in the earlier leak were related to Fethullah Gülen -- a cleric the Turkish government has blamed for the coup. However, "gülen" also means "smiling" in Turkish and many of those 1,400 emails containing the word "gülen" were actually holiday adverts.

So what Wikileaks did was search he dump for instances of the word, without checking their context.

Julian Assange once pledged to bring about a safe era of "ethical leaking" but lately he has been more grandstanding content which is largely useless.

His star has been taken by Intercept, which allows media outlets and other third-parties to vet the Snowden archive before unleashing it on the public.

Last modified on 16 August 2016
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