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NYT Accidentally Leaked Russian War Critics’ Phone Numbers: Report

The newspaper told Vice it had not fully scrubbed its metadata prior to publication, and that the phone numbers were accessible for several hours.

The source code of a bombshell investigation from The New York Times last September inadvertently contained the phone numbers of Russian soldiers opposed to the war, leaving the digits open and accessible for several hours, according to a report from Vice News. Despite the fact that the metadata of the story, which used audio files from disgruntled and disillusioned soldiers calling their relatives at home, was scrubbed prior to publication, some identifying information escaped the newspaper’s notice, a Times spokesperson told Motherboard. “We later learned that some buried metadata was live on the site for a few hours, and took prompt steps to remove it,” the spokesperson said. But Vice found more data—including “multiple” phone numbers, belonging not only to soldiers, but the relatives they were communicating with—embedded in the article’s code, which remained live until Wednesday afternoon. After Vice reached out to the Times again, the code was changed to read “null.”