You may remember that one of the funniest stories of 2022 was the way players from WarThunder—an arcade online shooter with real military vehicles—just keep posting military documents on the game forums. Not as espionage acts, but to Winning arguments over specifications.
So I’m incredibly excited to report that this is also shaping up to be one of the funniest stories of 2023.
The last time we stopped by these guys it was a few tank players who, despite ban after ban, continued to share detailed, classified information about currently deployed main battle tanks and their armament.
This week we experienced something similar, only now it’s about fighter planes. When Massive OP report, Earlier this week, a gamer “shared military documents related to the F-16 fighter jet to win a dispute”. The problem is that while these documents were not labeled classified military documentation like the Panzerjungen things, they were still restricted material “under the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), a State Department-enforced statute that established the Restricts Disclosure and Transmission of U.S. Weapons Data and Information to Foreign Persons, Including Dissemination on the Internet”. Not like that classifiedbut still not what should be posted on a video game forum.
Then, just a day later, someone else was there again! Another user this time Excerpts posted from over a dozen weapon system manuals for the F-15E. These, too, were unclassified – in fact, they were for systems old enough that they had been Approved– but like I said just because something isn’t secret doesn’t mean you can freely post it on internet forums where anyone in the world can see it. So they got deleted too.
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I said that last year, but I’ll say it again now, the fact that a video game’s forums has become one of the greatest opsec dangers of the modern age just because some guys want to argue about a gun’s stats is it very fun.
