[ddt_Osprey]

Boy, just like so many MP3 sharing services of yester-year. What a curious development!

Standard practice to poison the well of your enemies.

This is a phased approach by the way, and malware is a preliminary step. Next come reputation smearing forms of pornography, and hardware destroying payloads for the ones that have no reputation to smear.

[LeifCarrotson]

That's what I thought, too, when I just read the headline. But on reading the article, it becomes clear that they're just insufficiently curating the files they're distributing.

What should happen if some corrupt official's email contains a malware attachment? There is some value in not curating the data - it would be good to know if they responded to a social engineering attack, for example. Perhaps a payload reveals that some other government got into their email years ago, and has been blackmailing them?

Similarly, it would be informative to find that someone was using email to share pornography of themselves, especially if that pornography was blackmail material, but there ought to be some curation.

[ddt_Osprey]

Oh, clickbait. Nevermind.

I suppose maybe this identifies the polarity of backchannel.com's political alignment.