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Pentagon Leak Linked to Minecraft Nerds Fighting on Discord: Reports

“Here, have some leaked documents,” one user wrote in a Discord chat after an argument about the war in Ukraine.

Dozens of classified U.S. documents leaked and circulated online may have originated in now-defunct chatrooms on the social media platform Discord, including a server for fans of the video game Minecraft, according to multiple reports. Open-source intelligence analysts for the investigative outlet Bellingcat traced the cache to “Minecraft Earth Map,” a closed Discord server where some of the documents were posted as early as March 4—weeks before they surfaced on 4chan and began spreading across the internet. “After a brief spat with another person on the server about Minecraft Maps and the war in Ukraine, one of the Discord users replied: ‘Here, have some leaked documents’—attaching 10 documents about Ukraine, some of which bore the ‘top secret’ markings,” Aric Toler, a Bellingcat analyst, told The Guardian. The documents were posted even earlier on two other servers, one for fans of a Filipino YouTuber and another called “Thug Shaker Central,” where they may have been deposited as early as mid-January, according to Bellingcat.