Distributed Denial of Secrets

Emma Best and a member using the pseudonym The Architect started the project in 2018, and its initial archive went public in early December 2018. It published raw data through Tor hidden services, flagged material from state-sponsored hacks or material that could not be verified, and made some datasets available only on request.⁠[1]

On June 19, 2020, DDoSecrets published BlueLeaks, 269 GB of material originally taken from more than 200 U.S. police agencies, including training manuals and guides on containing protests. Four days later Twitter permanently banned the @DDoSecrets account under its rules on hacked material; Best said the group’s mission was “unchanged.”⁠[2]

BlueLeaks exposed personal data of some 700,000 law enforcement officers, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis described DDoSecrets as “a criminal hacker group.”⁠[3]

On July 7, 2020, Best announced that prosecutors in Zwickau, Germany, had seized the group’s “primary public download server.” She said distribution would be affected only temporarily, as BlueLeaks was still being seeded on torrents with priority access for journalists.⁠[4]

Distributed Denial of Secrets received federal tax-exempt status in September 2020 as a 501(c)(3) organization registered in San Francisco, California.⁠[5]

After Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, most of the data DDoSecrets received came from Russia; in March it published 817 GB of data from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s censorship agency.⁠[3]

On October 28, 2026, DDoSecrets published Icepick, records on more than 40,000 U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors, including names, job titles and work contact details; about 21,000 relate to Customs and Border Protection and about 10,000 to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its investigations unit.⁠[6]

The data was allegedly obtained by a hacktivist group called the Department of Peace, and DDoSecrets says it came from an Okta single sign-on system used by DHS; the group gave copies to DDoSecrets and independent journalist maia arson crimew, who built an online search tool. DHS said it was aware of “a potential breach” and was investigating.⁠[7]

Okta said it had no evidence that its data or systems were compromised. Best said the data identified officials overseeing covert operations and deportation programs, while Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People, said the email addresses and phone numbers would help Freedom of Information Act requests.⁠[8]

The Icepick search site went offline for a time. Host FlokiNET refused a removal request from DHS contractor ZeroFox, which argued the stolen data located real people; FlokiNET said it showed government employees’ work identities. Registrar CentralNic suspended the domain, and the site returned under another. BlueskyBlueskyBluesky is a decentralized social platform built on the AT Protocol; it grew out of an open-protocol project funded by Twitter in 2019 and is now developed and operated by the public benefit corporation Bluesky Social, PBC. It dropped invite-only access and opened to the public in February 2024, and by 2026 had more than 40 million users.Open the full entry blocked links for sharing contact details without permission.⁠[9]

DDoSecrets describes itself as “the world's largest public library of previously secret information” and publishes, archives and analyzes leaked and hacked datasets while protecting sources. Its listed team includes co-founder and journalist Emma Best and security engineer Micah Lee, formerly director of infosec at The InterceptThe InterceptThe Intercept is a New York-based nonprofit investigative news outlet founded on February 10, 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill under Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media, initially to report on the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden; it became an independent nonprofit separate from First Look in 2023.Open the full entry.⁠[10]

For fiscal 2024 the organization had revenue of $114,414 and expenses of $127,098, all of it from contributions.⁠[5]