Leaktivist

According to the leaktivist collective Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) roughly 70 gigabytes of posts, private messages, profiles and plaintext passwords were obtained in the hack.

Some comes from anonymous ‘leaktivists’, like the mole who released the Panama Papers in 2016, raising questions about the financial dealings of all sorts of people, from Putin’s friends and Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law to Mark Thatcher and several members of the Spanish royal family.

Threat actors today include not only the old standbys—Russia and China—but also North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and almost certainly the Saudis, Israelis, Turkey, and many others hungry for an edge in dealing with the United States; non-state actors, such as the Lebanese Hezbollah, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda hoping to exploit American security weaknesses; transnational criminal organizations and ideologically driven entities, such as hacktivists, leaktivists, and public-disclosure organizations (think WikiLeaks); not to mention freelance secrets-brokers harvesting sensitive data and intellectual property to sell on the black market.