If you want to share top-secret documents with one another, especially from the government through illegal means, you probably shouldn’t use video game chat apps to do so. And just for the sake of winning an argument to boot.

That’s what happened recently, as a bunch of documents leaked from the Pentagon appears to be shared through video game chat platform Discord. All this is done to win an online argument about the war in Ukraine. This leak of information involving the Russian-Ukraine conflict was predicted by open-source intelligence analysts like Chasseur Group (via analyst Munira Mustaffa).

“The Ukrainian government has dismissed the leak as a Russian propaganda tactic, but experts believe the leaked intelligence briefs are authentic. The damage caused by the leak is still being assessed. Still, it could have significant implications for Ukraine’s war efforts by revealing the Russian agencies that the US is most familiar with.”

The documents in question show estimated casualties in the Bakhmut theatre of battle, with two versions of these being passed around in the chat group and their respective rooms. The edited versions are meant to understate Russian casualties and overstate Ukrainian ones. The unaltered version came from 4chan, which I’m very sure our readers should be familiar with.

Analysts from research group Bellingcat via analyst Aric Toler said that documents have been shared in closed Discord chatrooms, specifically in servers called “Minecraft Earth Map” on around 4th March (via The Guardian).

“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.

Posts and channel listings show that the server’s users were interested in video games, music, Orthodox Christianity, and fandom for the popular YouTuber ‘Oxide’. This server was not especially geopolitical in nature, although its users had a staunchly conservative stance on several issues, members told Bellingcat. Racial slurs and racist memes were shared widely.”

This isn’t the first time that online disputes between video gamers have sparked an intelligence breach and caused issues between the military and gaming community alike. Remember Gaijin Entertainment’s online game War Thunder? A lot of fans of the game have been arguing about how accurate the game is with its war machines, so some of these “smart” individuals would go out of their way to show off classified information to win a War Thunder accuracy argument.