http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/wikileaks-syria-files-syria-russia-bank-2-billion/
A trove of hacked emails published by WikiLeaks in 2012 excludes records of a 2 billion transaction between the Syrian regime and a government-owned Russian bank, according to leaked U.S. court documents obtained by the Daily Dot.
WikiLeaks has become an ever-prominent force in the 2016 presidential election through its publishing of tens of thousands of emails, voicemails, and documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee by hackers that U.S. authorities and cybersecurity experts believe are linked to the Russian government. The transparency organization, which boasts of a commitment to use cryptography to protect human rights against repressive regimes, has faced criticism from supporters of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and praise from Republican opponent Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The court records, placed under seal by a Manhattan federal court and obtained by the Daily Dot through an anonymous source, show in detail how a group of hacktivists breached the Syrian governments networks on the eve of the countrys civil war and extracted emails about major bank transactions the Syrian regime was hurriedly making amid a host of economic sanctions. In the spring of 2012, most of the emails found their way into a WikiLeaks database.
But one set of emails in particular didnt make it into the cache of documents published by WikiLeaks in July 2012 as The Syria Files, despite the fact that the hackers themselves were ecstatic at their discovery. The correspondence, which WikiLeaks has denied withholding, describes more than 2 billion ($2.4 billion, at current exchange rates) moving from the Central Bank of Syria to Russias VTB Bank.
Basically, we have access to several internal routers, the main telecom gateway in Syria, the phone infrastructure to some extent, and yes, possibly television, that hacker announced in a chatroom, speaking to fellow members of RevoluSec, a group of pro-revolution activists who repeatedly carried out sophisticated cyberattacks against the Syrian government for roughly a year.
To be honest, people have been trying to hack these for years, a representative of RevoluSec said of Syrian websites in a September 2011 interview with Al Jazeera. But we were extremely thorough in searching for vulnerabilities, and when it came down to it, there were a ton.
We also have a team full of extremely knowledgeable people who are very, very good at what they do, while the system administrators in Syria, it seems, are not. Their internet security was lax, and as a result, anyone looking hard enough for vulnerabilities was able to find what they wanted, the RevoluSec member said.
More than 500 pages of sealed documents reveal in extraordinary detail how a handful of activists seized near-total control of Syrias internet and then employed that power to conduct real-time surveillance on many of the nations top ministry officials. The leaked records, amassed during the U.S. government investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and affiliated hackers worldwide, likewise confirm RevoluSec to be the source of The Syria Files, a cache of more than 2 million Syrian government emails published by WikiLeaks over the summer of 2012.
The leaked documents offer evidence that not every email intercepted by RevoluSec found its way into WikiLeaks database, despite the fervor of the hackers who wished them exposed.