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Julian Assange: All That Malware On Wikileaks Isn't a Big Deal (vice.com)
WikiLeaks celebrates its 10th anniversary today. At a press conference, its editor Julian Assange hinted that Wikileaks could soon disclose more things about the U.S. election. Making use of the occasion, Motherboard asked Assange about the malware that Wikileaks website contains. To which, Assange responded (via Motherboard): âoeThe [Hillary] Clinton campaign has been going around saying 'don't read Wikileaks, because there's malware,'" Assange said in response to a general question about malware on the site from Motherboard. Talking specifically about malicious files that were included within a recent dump of emails from Turkey, Assange emphasised that there wasn't an issue for users who just visited the site, and that people needed to download the files themselves. "However this same risk exists for most '.exe' or '.doc' files downloaded elsewhere from the internet or received by email. As time goes by we flag documents to alert readers," a print-out given to journalists at the press conference reads. Assange even thought that the presence of malware itself was noteworthy. "There was malware sent to [the ruling Turkish party] AKP, either from criminals or from state attacks on the AKP. That's extremely interesting," he said.
Don't put words in his mouth. He didn't say 'no big deal'. The gist of what he said was more that, for security researchers and people interested in this sort of thing, having the malware available for analysis within document dumps can prove a fruitful line of enquiry, and people downloading and extracting these dumps are unlikely to be the mouthbreathing 'hurr durr an exe gotta run it see what it does' idiots.
Doc files, I can see some merit in providing two dumps, one with any autoplay macros neutered. Or at least, putting a massive great warning reminding researchers to take care.
Uh, what is misrepresentative here? The website hosts files that contain malware. Just because you expected it did, doesn't make it not a threat. Do you think journalists who are downloading the files are viewing them in a VM sandbox? Most likely they are now infected with malware. If you visit Wikileaks then you are likely going there to get these files. Most people who read those files are going to get infected because most people aren't going to take precautions.