Russia is known for its army of hackers, but since the start of its invasion of Ukraine, dozens of Russian organizations — including government agencies, oil and gas companies, and financial institutions — have been hacked, with terabytes of stolen data leaked onto the internet.

Distributed Denial of Secrets, the transparency collective that’s best known for its 2020 release of 270 gigabytes of U.S. law enforcement data (in the midst of racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd), has become the de facto home of the hacked datasets from Russia. The datasets are submitted to DDoSecrets mostly by anonymous hackers, and those datasets are then made available to the public on the collective’s website and distributed using BitTorrent. (I am an adviser to DDoSecrets).

“The flood of Russian data has meant a lot of sleepless nights, and it’s truly overwhelming,” Emma Best, co-founder of DDoSecrets, told The Intercept via an encrypted messaging app. “In its first 10 years, WikiLeaks claimed to publish 10 million documents. In the less than two months since the invasion began, we’ve published over 6 million Russian documents — and it absolutely feels like it.”

After receiving a dataset, DDoSecrets organizes and compresses the data; it then starts distributing the data using BitTorrent for public consumption, publicizes it, and helps journalists at a wide range of newsrooms access and report on it. DDoSecrets has published about 30 hacked datasets from Russia since its invasion of Ukraine began in late February.

The vast majority of sources who provided the hacked Russian data appear to be anonymous individuals, many self-identifying as part of the Anonymous hacktivist movement. Some sources provide email addresses or other contact information as part of the dumped data, and some, like Network Battalion 65, have their own social media presence....