Lorax B. Horne
(They/Them)
As seen in:
Medium,
The Guardian,
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC),
Newsweek,
Substack,
Taylor & Francis Online,
The Globe and Mail,
International Business Times (U.S.),
Calgary Herald,
ELLE Canada
and
Covers:
politics, Ecuador, Latin America, technology, activism, free speech, human rights, national security
Occasional journalist, editor, community manager / @vacantmap cartographer / free palestine from river to sea bsky.app/profile/lorax.bsky.social
Articles by Lorax B. Horne
Hackstar in Exile: My intro to the American Wikileaks rapist
For me, it started the summer of Snowden in 2013. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, I am a journalist working on the web desk of a national newspaper. It's my first paid job in the country. Julian Assange has asylum in Ecuador's embassy in London. I was on a missionary visa in Ecuador my whole childhood, into my early 20s. I left the church when I started university, in Canada.
Release: ExtractivistLeaks (2TB)
We release this series of datasets at the same time as they are published by Enlace Hacktivista, the anonymous platform for the documentation of hacker history. The source for these leaks is the hacktivist collective Guacamaya. Guacamaya outlined their motivation in a statement in Spanish that reads in part: The datasets in this release include: Hacked emails from the state mining company of Ecuador, ENAMI, which was founded under ex-president Rafael Correa's administration.
Molly White contributed €500 to Adopt a hacker
Here's the campaign that needs your help €9,276 raised 122 contributors 46 days running Donk_enby is a pseudonymous hacktivist from somewhere in Europe. This mobile security researcher has lost jobs and income thanks to her selfless work documenting and preventing coups and wars. This fund will help her travel to safety, and pay for rent. Browse View Slideshow Add Hide comments Comments ✕ Uh oh! Your media gallery is empty.
Fredrick R. Brennan contributed €1,000 to Adopt a hacker
Here's the campaign that needs your help €6,156 raised 63 contributors 42 days running Donk_enby is a pseudonymous hacktivist from somewhere in Europe. This mobile security researcher has lost jobs and income thanks to her selfless work documenting and preventing coups and wars. This fund will help her travel to safety, and pay for rent. Browse View Slideshow Add Hide comments Comments ✕ Uh oh! Your media gallery is empty.
Distributed Email of Secrets
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Adopt a hacker reached a milestone
Here's the campaign that needs your help €1,007 raised 21 contributors 9 days running Donk_enby is a pseudonymous hacktivist from somewhere in Europe. This mobile security researcher has lost jobs and income thanks to her selfless work documenting and preventing coups and wars. This fund will help her travel to safety, and pay for rent. Browse View Slideshow Add Hide comments Comments ✕ Uh oh! Your media gallery is empty.
Adopt a hacker
Donk_enby is a prolific hacktivist, best known for archiving the social media site Parler in January 2021. After the January 6 insurrection in Washington D.C., Donk found a vulnerability in Parler's iOS mobile app that allowed her to capture more than 30 terabytes of Parler user-generated video and metadata before it was removed by Amazon. We at DDoSecrets worked with her to archive that data, at the time.
Nauru Police Force (82 GB)
The Nauru Police leak includes 285,635 emails from the Nauru Police Force, documenting conditions of the island and abuses endured by asylum-seekers and refugees. Many are asylum seekers in Nauru are from Iran, while others came from Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, Pakistan and Sri Lanka or are stateless. The following statement by the source was posted to Enlace Hacktivista, where the information was first released.
Release: Elektrocentromontazh (1.7 TB)
1.23 million emails from Elektrocentromontazh (ECM) / Электроцентромонтаж, the chief power organization of Russia (and previously the USSR) since 1940. ECM designs, tests, builds, installs and maintains electrical equipment in power generation and transmission facilities in over 25 regions of Russia.
Release: PSCB JSC Bank (542 GB)
Today we are publishing 229,000 emails and 630,000 files from the Petersburg Social Commercial Bank / Петербургский социальный коммерческий банк, one of the top 100 Russian banks in terms of net assets.
Release: Sawatzky (432 GB)
Clients of Sawatsky property management. Image from their website. One of two releases today, Sawatzky includes 575,000 emails from the property management company. According to their website, Sawatzky's clients include Du Pont, Lenovo, Whirlpool, Aveva, Wella, Johnson + Johnson, Cisco, Google, Swatch, Avito, Samsung, Microsoft, Western Union, Saint-gobain, Turkish Airlines, and British American Tobacco.
Release: Gazregion (222 GB)
Emails and files from Gazregion, a construction company specializing in gas pipelines and facilities. Gazregion's clients include Gazprom. Gazregion, headquartered in Moscow, has laid thousands of kilometers of pipelines as part of the Russian Federation's program to transport gas throughout different regions. Three different hacktivist sources submitted files from Gazregion at approximately the same time, with some overlap.
Release: Gazprom Linde Engineering (728 GB)
This dataset includes 768,000 emails from Gazprom Linde Engineering, which specializes in designing gas and petrochemical processing facilities and oil refineries. A joint venture between Gazprom and Linde, Gazprom Linde Engineering's clients include Gazprom, Gazprom Invest, Gazprom Neft, Linde, Novatek, Tatneft, China National Chemical Engineering, Sojitz and RusChemAlliance. Linde was a German-founded company, and is now headquartered in Ireland and the UK.
Releases: Russian Ministry of Culture, Blagoveshchensk City and Tver's Governor office
On the 46th day of the war in Ukraine, we have added three new datasets from Russia to our growing collection. They are: 230,000 emails from the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation / Министерство культуры Российской Федерации, which is responsible for state policy regarding art, cinematography, archives, copyright, cultural heritage, and censorship. 230,000 emails from the Blagoveshchensk City Administration / Благове́щенск from 2019 through 2022.
Releases: Petrovsky Fort, Aerogas and Forest / Форест
In addition to adding torrents for three new leaks today, the VGTRK emails from earlier in the week are being added to the search.ddosecrets.com subdomain. Today’s new data includes: Petrofort (244 GB) Approximately 300,000 emails from Petrovsky Fort, a large office building complex and business center in Saint Petersburg, in the Vyborgskiy District close to the bank of the river Neva. Petrofort is owned by the Swiss-registered investment company ENR Russia Invest SA.
Release: VGTRK (786.2 GB)
Today we publish 900,000 emails and 4,000 files from VGTRK / ВГТРК (All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company / Всероссийская государственная телевизионная и радиовещательная компания), a Russian state-owned broadcaster which operates five national TV stations, two international networks, five radio stations, and over 80 regional TV and radio networks.
Limited distribution: Russian Orthodox charity emails (15 GB)
In the Cyberwar category, we are listing about 57,500 emails from the Russian Orthodox Church's charitable wing. Due to the possibly sensitive nature of the dataset, we are including it as Limited Distribution, which means it is only available to researchers and journalists upon request. For new readers, the limited distribution request process works like this: Researchers and journalists with a background in publishing can get in touch with our email.
Cyberwar updates: Thozis Corp and MashOil, etc
Since the Ukraine invasion, Anonymous has declared Russia fair game. Some of the data added to DDoSecrets since last week includes: Thozis Corp (5.9 GB) 5,500 emails from Thozis Corp., a Russian investment firm owned by Zakhar Smushkin (number 2,674 on Forbes' billionaire list), which is involved in the project to build the Yuzhny satellite city in Saint Petersburg.
Release: Transneft (79 GB)
We are releasing 79 gigabytes of emails from the OMEGA Company, the R&D department of Russia's state-controlled pipeline company, Transneft / Транснефть. Transneft is the world's largest oil pipeline company. The emails cover the account's most recent activity, including after the introduction of American sanctions on February 25, 2022. . Some of the emails reflect some of the effects of those sanctions. On March 15, the European Union also announced new sanctions for Transneft.
Release: Roskomnadzor (820 GB)
In the Cyberwar category, we are listing 340,000 files from the Роскомнадзор or Roskomnadzor of the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan. By population, Bashkortostan is one of the larger republics of the Russian federation, and Roskomnadzor is the Russian federal agency responsible for the monitoring and censorship of Russian media. Roskomnadzor's activities are always a matter of public interest to the people of Russia and to the world.
Release: Mining Secrets (4.2 TB)
Today we announce 4.2 TBs of data from the Swiss-registered mining and investment company Solway (USD $624.2 million yearly revenue). Solway operates El Fenix nickel mine in Izabal, Guatemala. The new data consists of files and emails hacked from the company in the spring of 2021. DDoSecrets received the data from a source, Guacamaya and with Guacamaya’s agreement, waited for Forbidden Stories’ embargo to conclude to announce the data.
Limited distribution: Tetraedr (222 GB)
Disclaimer for all releases in the new Cyberwar section Datasets that were released in the buildup to, in the midst of, or in the aftermath of a cyberwar or hybrid war. Therefore, there is an increased chance of malware, ulterior motives and altered or implanted data, or false flags/fake personas. As a result, we encourage readers, researchers and journalists to take additional care with the data.
Limited distribution: GiveSendGo 4.0 (5 GB) and Adopt-a-Trucker emails (250 MB)
The leaks are coming hard and fast this month, so a joint newsletter is in order. Due to PII, we are releasing GiveSendGo 4.0 only to other journalists and researchers who make a request.
Limited Distribution: GiveSendGo Trucker donors (33.6 MB)
On February 10, the Superior Court of Ontario ordered the US Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo to freeze the money from a fundraising campaign for the trucker occupation that has blockaded downtown Ottawa as well as key transportation routes and US border crossings across Canada. The protest started in opposition to vaccination requirements for truckers crossing the international border, but has expanded to include many far right and anti-government strains.
Limited distribution: GiveSendGo part II (2.5 GB)
Today we are listing over 1,000 files consisting of identification cards (including driver's licenses, passports, military IDs, visas, birth certificates, insurance cards and more) uploaded onto GiveSendGo's publicly accessible Amazon-hosted S3 bucket in a sub-directory apparently labeled "legacy/stripe_document". The IDs seem to belong to crowdfund campaign creators, rather than their donors.
Release: Patriot Front (450 GB)
Alongside Unicorn Riot, we are publishing torrents to a new leak of 450 gigabytes from Patriot Front, the neo-nazi group. This release includes videos, images, chat messages and organizing minutes from Patriot Front, the white supremacist group active in the United States since 2017. Patriot Front has been known to seek to target and disrupt social movements.
Release: Petroworks (447 GB)
The newest release from DDoSecrets adds Colombia and Ecuador to the list of countries we’ve published leaks from. Today’s 447 gigabytes of files and emails from Petroworks joins the trove of earlier data from oil and gas companies that we’ve included in the Environmental category on our wiki.
The secret of BlueLeaks: security, police, and the continuum of pacification
ABSTRACT This paper reveals the secrets of BlueLeaks, a massive archive of documents hacked from police agencies, and intelligence centers in the United States. A September 2019 Intelligence Assessment by the Virginia Fusion Center cites counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen to evaluate the ‘insurgency tactics and strategies’ of environmentalists. What is remarkable about the document is not the domestic application of counterinsurgency but how it reveals the biases of security.
Release: Oath Keepers (5 GB)
The Oath Keepers are a far-right militia founded by Stewart Rhodes in 2009. Several members of the paramilitary network have been charged for their role in the January 6, 2021 US Capitol insurrection in Washington D.C.. Distributed Denial of Secrets received a cache of Oath Keeper data from a source. On Sept. 27, we published 5 gigabytes of redacted data from the secretive militia including emails and chat messages from their Rocket.chat, a Slack alternative.
Release: #EpikFail (180 GB)
Hackers aligned with the Anonymous movement published a trove of data from the webhost Epik, which hosts far-right websites. People have been using the hashtag #EpicFail and starting dedicated accounts (not affiliated with DDoSecrets) to cover the revelations coming out from this dataset, like who registered the website for the Oathkeepers, for TheDonald.Win, or what other domains are owned by Alex Jones’ IT director.
Capitalism fan fiction
Welcome to Off the record by me, Lorax B. Horne. they/them・dissident journalist・author: @blue_leaks・2020 Rising Star @writerstrust・⚧・my links: https://t.co/PRaKYOo1q3 Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue. In the meantime, tell your friends!
Limited Distribution: Metropolitan PD
Babuk posted screenshots of the ransom negotiations to their website. The police negotiator’s messages are in black. A full transcript of the exchange was produced by Emma Best The leak from the Metropolitan Police Department (#MPDLeaks) of D.C. totals 250 gigabytes, uploaded progressively by ransomware group Babuk to their .onion site.
Updates: GiveSendGo
This data, released to journalists and other researchers, is broken down by campaign and includes names, donation amounts, comments and email addresses. The Guardian followed-up an April 10 story about the Proud Boys fundraisers in the GiveSendGo data, with a bombshell about the police and public officials’ email addresses linked to donations to an accused killer.
Release: Tillie Kottmann (20 GB)
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Release: Myanmar Investments (156 GB)
This release includes more than 3,000 confidential documents, obtained via a hack of the Myanmar Investment Commission, including proposals and approved investments. The data can be fetched via this torrent, linked to from our wiki. The source has detailed how a site vulnerability was used to extract the data (Burmese version). Security researchers have gone on to publish the list of companies included in the release, grouped by their countries of origin.
Release: GabLeaks (70 GB)
Artist interpretation of a mentally ill trans demon hacker. Contributed by @glennmerrill GabLeaks is 70 gigabytes of public and private posts, user profiles, hashed passwords, DMs, and plaintext passwords for groups from the far-right social media site Gab. This dataset includes over 70,000 messages in more than 19,000 chats, by 15,000 users, in plaintext format. GabLeaks is being released as limited distribution, because of the large amount of private information and password hashes it contains.
Release: Jones Day Chicago emails
Jones Day is a law firm that was targeted by the ransomware group cl0p. Cl0p is one of the hacker gangs that publish their own leaks sites, which we categorize in the ransomware section of our index. Today we have determined a portion of the Jones Day dataset worthy of public release. This portion includes a cache of emails from the City of Chicago and the Chicago Police Department.
Release: Myanmar Financials (330.5 GB)
This release, the most recent chapter in our Banker’s Box series of corporate registries and financial industry data, includes hundreds of thousands of records about corporate ownership of companies in Myanmar, scraped from myco.dica.gov.mm and bo.dica.gov.mm. Mapping the nationalities of the corporate officers in Myanmar’s DICA registry.
Release: .Win Network
Continuing our work to archive data related to the January 6 coup attempt in Washington D.C. and the online activities of global white supremacy movements, we are publishing 4.5 GB of data from the .Win networks of sites. This data was collected and has been indexed for searches by the researchers from SMAT (Social Media Analysis Toolkit). The raw data hasn't previously been made available to journalists and researchers. Thank you to SMAT, for this new resource.
Release: Parler
This release includes over a million videos and a million images uploaded to Parler, including ones from the January 6 Washington D.C. coup attempt. Due to the size of this archive, the data is currently only available via two Amazon S3 buckets, ddosecrets-parler (32.1TB) and ddosecrets-parler-images (235GB). These S3 buckets are open to the public but configured with Requester Pays, meaning that you must have valid AWS credentials to access the data, and Amazon will charge you for all bandwidth.
Release: Ransomware data
Ransomware is a new category of data leak that we can't ignore. Several ransomware crews have begun releasing data which they hacked and published on their own leak sites. Early in our lifecycle, we published Perceptics in our index, and are aware of the public interest of that data set, which came from a ransomware origin. We believe there will be other public interest datasets in this ransomware category, and want to be upfront about the nature of the sources in republishing this data.
Announcement: DDoSecrets and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science
DDoSecrets exists to bring relevant data to the public. We are always looking for groups that are publishing with meaningful commitments to public access. Having benefited from an earlier ad hoc arrangement with an academic entity, we looked for a group that could foresee mutual benefit to working longer term with the datasets we have published.
bbhorne (Lorax B. Horne) on Keybase
What the heck is Keybase? Keybase is an open source app Keybase comes with everything you need to manage your identity, create secure chats, and share files privately. It's free. It's fun too. Over 100,000 people have joined Keybase so far to prove their identities, and it's growing rapidly.
Announcement: Legal defense fund
TL;DR: See the GoFundMe page launching a legal defense fund for DDoSecrets. On June 19th, a group of privacy and transparency activists, Distributed Denial of Secrets, published a 269 GB set of police data in the public interest that became known as BlueLeaks .
Distributed Email of Secrets
Distributed Email of Secrets Distributed Denial of Secrets New releases from Distributed Denial of Secrets, a transparency collective publishing interesting data. Created 12 Jul 2020
What is BlueLeaks?
On June 19, 2020, Distributed Denial of Secrets published 269 gigabytes of data from over 200 different law enforcement fusion centers, training centers and other police field offices. Below find the media stories that this document release, the largest contemporary leak of data from U.S. law enforcement, has inspired.
20 things I learned from #29 Leaks
I’ve compiled this post to keep track of the stories breaking from a dump of information dubbed #29 Leaks. Formations House is a London shop with a prestigious address specialising in creating companies to ease the international movement of money. Fifteen years’ worth of their company’s files, including faxes, bank transfers and audio of phone calls, was sent to transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets (correctly shortened as DDoSecrets or DDOS) by a source we’ve called Babylon.
O Ye of Little Faith
My first memory is set in my old front yard in Kingston, Ontario. My parents moved to Kingston after I was born, drawn there for a particular reason: it was the city with highest concentration of federal prisons in Canada. My parents were full-time volunteers, mailing correspondence Bible courses to prisoners and often visiting their students to project movies or share holidays. That childhood picture of myself sitting on Santa’s lap—Santa was a convicted murderer serving a life sentence.
Limited distribution: LATAM Peru and Colombia receipts
DDoSecrets announced on June 18 that a politically-motivated hacker hit Spanish telecommunications giant Everis. Emma Best wrote the hackers “were interested in data from Latin American subsidiaries of Everis / NTT Data. According to a note they left Everis and shared with Distributed Denial of Secrets, they were initially only interested in data relating to Latin American subsidiaries and … contracts.
Opinion: Why you should care about who's watching you online
Journalist Bethany Horne on what she learned about Internet privacy while working in Ecuador. When I was six years old, my parents, who worked as Christian missionaries, moved our family of five from Kingston, Ont., to Guayaquil, Ecuador. Growing up, I remember building kites with bamboo sticks and garbage bags during long afternoons at the beach, climbing into wobbly-branched mango trees to retrieve the golden fruit and taking family holidays in the Andes.
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