Microsoft president Brad Smith claims that Russian intelligence has been infiltrating online gaming communities, this of course comes after top secret documents were leaked on a Discord server. The statement came on-stage at Semafor’s World Economy Summit, where Smith stated that Microsoft has been dealing with attempts from The Wagner Group— a pro-Russian private military corporation— to push Russian information.
Smith reiterated that “For the last several months, our digital threat analysis team has been identifying efforts by the Russians to basically penetrate gaming communities… And we’ve been advising governments about this. It’s The Wagner Group, it’s Russian intelligence, and they’re using this as a place to get information into circulation. That’s what happened here. It included the Discord channel around Minecraft, it included others of these [communities].” Smith as well acknowledged that this is merely isolated to chatroom communities, where he said, “It’s not like playing Call of Duty is going to, like, lead to deaths in the real world, these are video games.”
The statement from Smith comes after a massive document leak came from a Discord server where 21-year-old Air National Guardsman openly shared top-secret information to his gaming friends. He is alleged to have first typed up each of the top-secret Pentagon documents but eventually resorted to simply copying and sharing images onto the server of the papers. Those documents later leaked out, as the Washington Post reported last night, that foreign agents infiltrated the server without any clarification of who they were and then saved those documents to share online. Among them the documents reveal vulnerabilities to Ukraine’s defenses in the ongoing Ukrainian War with Russia.
This also isn’t the first time classified documents have leaked out into online gaming communities. War Thunder a popular online multiplayer game is the most well-known for numerous documents leaks revealing sensitive information.