25,000 email addresses and passwords reportedly dumped online from NIH, WHO, Gates Foundation, and Wuhan Institute of Virology

[Arugula]

Unknown activists have posted nearly 25,000 email addresses and passwords allegedly belonging to the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation and other groups working to combat the coronavirus pandemic, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism and terrorist groups.

While SITE was unable to verify whether the email addresses and passwords were authentic, the group said the information was released Sunday and Monday and almost immediately used to foment attempts at hacking and harassment by far-right extremists. An Australian cybersecurity expert, Robert Potter, said he was able to verify that the WHO email addresses and passwords were real.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/tech...y-nih-who-gates-foundation-are-dumped-online/

Even if this data breach is overstated, it's definitely going to cause a lot of conspiracy speculation, people posting misinformation to push an agenda, or just out of context information that can be interpreted in the eye of the beholder. Here are some early claims:


Source: https://twitter.com/Killionaire69/status/1252727608061710339?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1252727608061710339&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ibtimes.sg%2Fwho-wuhan-lab-hack-reveals-coronavirus-spliced-hiv-make-it-deadly-spread-using-dry-ice-43536

The screenshot doesn't have the text he has translated.


Source: https://twitter.com/HeisenburgK/status/1252715834004213760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1252715834004213760&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ibtimes.sg%2Fwho-wuhan-lab-hack-reveals-coronavirus-spliced-hiv-make-it-deadly-spread-using-dry-ice-43536

The 4chan post doesn't reference any emails and is from February 16th.

 

[Mendel]

I noticed a WHO subsite being down on Monday.

 

[Hevach]

Always something worth doing (but hard to do unless you're spending bitcoin on shady stuff) is to cross reference a supposed leak like this to other breaches, it's happened where supposed bombshell breaches were actually just a subset of another breach.

Reversing the translation in the first post:

Pīnjiē HIV SNP AML983 xīnguān bìngdú*

Actual translation of the text is "Introduction HIV SNP AML983 filling virus*," which seems consistent with the section titling of a standard research publication, likely the already-withdrawn one that didn't make any such claim.


*-"filing virus" seems to be a mistranslation of coronavirus, since playing with the spacing and subwords both xīnguān bìngdú and guànzhuāng bìngdú are both translated as coronavirus. I'm not sure what the distinction is, but the complete lack of any word resembling anything relating to recombinant DNA/RNA is the important detail, there's no ambiguity in the word Jiǎnjiè.