Most of the "leaks" are just documents that had been leaked elsewhere and circulated around the internet for years previously, that got reposted and reported without context.
Is this an actual leak or another case of an export-controlled document that's already circulating around the internet getting posted on their forums? Most of the war thunder "classified leaks" have just been that.
There's a huge amount of info available about the CAPTOR radar, its E-CAPTOR successor, and the common European radar successor. There are Wikipedia articles, promotional videos, marketing materials, and so forth.
This video[1] gives enough info that a game dev could make up a basic simulator for a game.
But that's just the basic mode. The thing has an large number of modes. Apparently it mostly manages them by itself, which is the clever part. It can act as a search radar, a targeting radar, a jammer, an RF weapon, a ground target mode, and even a bistatic mode, where one plane sends and another receives, so the attacker can get in close while not emitting.
I really doubt there’s anything meaningful coming out of these documents. It’s not going to change any literally a single country spends their military budget
I don’t think anyone is concerned about budgets. Having intimate details into the systems of these craft and understanding how they operate in great detail makes it much easier to 1. Copy it, 2. Defend against it, 3. Find critical vulnerabilities in its design, 4. Build offensive systems that take advantage of any shortcomings, 5. Fast tracks their own jet fighter programs (which to your point does affect budgets because someone else had paid for the R&D)
The same is true for any IP/competitive advantage.
It’s funny how in our industry security through obsecurity is a thing we avoid, but other industries are literally built on the foundation of hiding information in order to stay ahead
Also because so much of software is uniquely poorly suited to obscurity. Attackers will often be able to probe the "obscure" system at their leisure trying to reverse it, or in non-SAAS cases get their hands on the actual (compiled) algorithm itself. And once you figure it out every single copy works exactly the same.
It's not like trying to measure the penetrating capabilities of a tank round, where you need physical access to a batch of large, expensive, explosive, tightly controlled objects to figure it out.
At least some classified stuff is well known to other country's intelligence services, friend, neutral, and foe. It can be so far out of the bag, it's had kittens.
Lot of stuff is classified not because it would actually prevent other nations from finding out stuff, but to hide from the American people and press embarrassing things like how much money is being spent on that particular project or weapons system, how much of a failure it has been, how much toxic waste is being created in its manufacture, and so on.
There's also all the stuff Internet Armchair Intelligence Officers think is "sensitive" or "classified."
China has access to all of our tech leaks, and yet, they cannot replicate it, neither can Russia, heck Russia has these really powerful jet planes... but they got less than a handful of them, and their GDP is comparable to the state of Florida's GDP.
> yet, they cannot replicate it, neither can Russia, heck Russia has these really powerful jet planes
Russia has powerful Soviet-era planes. Their new kit is demonstrably crap, being unable to establish even air supremacy against a foe wielding handfuls of decades-old air defence equipment.
There is also a P != NP difference between replicating a war machine and reverse engineering it sufficiently to defeat it, e.g. designing a radar that mitigates its stealth.
The forum has it not because it's common knowledge but because people with top secret clearance happen to frequent the forum and like to talk about/boast about the tech they work with.
An enemy state's ability to get an agent deep inside the military, or to entice someone already inside to turn traitor, or to hack through the layers of security to extract data over the network is largely disconnected from an insider's desire to chat about what they did at work.
I'd expect a enemy state's ability to get information out of a system would in fact be correlated with insider's desires to chat about what they did at work. Find some bloke who is a bit lonely, a bit talkative and has good security access, send out a hot woman with an unexpected interest in military specifications. I'm no spymaster but that seems like something a spy agency could manage. Might be able to grab a stickynote with a few key passwords on it to sweeten the operation.
Even better a woman who kinda looks like the target’s ex - a duper hot woman stands out and might activate the bloke’s memory of training. Spies whole thing is to blend in, appear unremarkable.
> The forum has it not because it's common knowledge but because people with top secret clearance happen to frequent the forum and like to talk about/boast about the tech they work with.
Not really. The forum has it because the low-level maintenance grunts are on the forums and like talking about the thing they work on, and don't think of the manual as some super-secret state secret because honestly it mostly isn't, and is classified out of habit rather than out of deep thought.
> An enemy state's ability to get an agent deep inside the military, or to entice someone already inside to turn traitor, or to hack through the layers of security to extract data over the network is largely disconnected from an insider's desire to chat about what they did at work.
It's hardly "deep inside", and an enemy state is surely capable of befriending some low-level military personnel, at which point they'll say much the same technically-classified-but-not-super-important things to their in-person friends as they do on internet fora.
I know this is serious, but this trope is kinda hilarious to me. Someone needs to prove themselves right so badly that they risk prison time by posting classified docs.
Depends entirely on what kind of connections you have. The government will happily waive rules to let you off the hook, or raid your dwelling early in the morning with guns drawn, then stage evidence if need be.
It's 137,097,280 euros a year today. $131 million revenue with 200 employees.. I've worked at 1200-2500 employee companies that were 10ths of that, if that.
Gajin has companies all over the world, I'm assuming this is only their hungarian revenue. I don't know if its only their hungarian employees, I assume so..
edit: I just noticed the ceginfomacio.hu link shows 56 people, 1 owner reported 1/1/2023. So, 56 hungarian employees?
My pet conspiracy theory about these leaks is that the military uses WarThunder as a training sim, and every now and then someone notices the physics/render is off so they "leak" the specs knowing some gaming nerd is going to fix it for them.
AI written article that's a poorly reused template of earlier story, applied to not-actually-classified information. And we're 44 comments in and most someone has noticed is observing it sounds like "early Wikipedia"
The Captor-E AESA variant is not yet in service with the main countries developing it, despite the project starting in 1993.
In fact, only export customers (Kuwait and Qatar) have the Captor-E ECRS Mk0 on their Typhoons so far, Germany and the UK (in particular) are holding out for future improvements, and are scheduled to get later versions, so they still have the mech-scanned PESA version as far as I've heard.
Military propaganda media (like Top Gun and Call of Duty) seems to be a double edged sword for the state, since the people it works the best on are also most susceptible to compromising secrets due to their deep seated insecurities.
> the people it works the best on are also most susceptible to compromising secrets due to their deep seated insecurities
Can you elaborate on that? Who are the people it works best on? How are deep seated insecurities related to propensity to revealing secrets? Is this just an online thing or is this type of person more likely to reveal secrets in an intelligence operation scenario? How do you know all of this?
It works best on young men who are socially, romantically and sometimes financially struggling. It gives them a sense of power and belonging to the state, something greater than themselves. The same mechanisms that make this propaganda successful can be used (willingly or organically) to cause the effected individual to take other actions. Here someone wanted to brag so they leaked secrets online. One would argue people like Timothy McVeigh were similar, with much different results.
That's why I said sometimes financial, because there are people who are well off or at least have it together financially that can still be exploited with propaganda.
List of Classified Document Leaks for War Thunder: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=29240...
Apparently the latest incident was a repost of a document that was first leaked on the forum back in 2023 (see Eurofighter Typhoon).
Most of the "leaks" are just documents that had been leaked elsewhere and circulated around the internet for years previously, that got reposted and reported without context.
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Is this an actual leak or another case of an export-controlled document that's already circulating around the internet getting posted on their forums? Most of the war thunder "classified leaks" have just been that.
There's a huge amount of info available about the CAPTOR radar, its E-CAPTOR successor, and the common European radar successor. There are Wikipedia articles, promotional videos, marketing materials, and so forth.
This video[1] gives enough info that a game dev could make up a basic simulator for a game. But that's just the basic mode. The thing has an large number of modes. Apparently it mostly manages them by itself, which is the clever part. It can act as a search radar, a targeting radar, a jammer, an RF weapon, a ground target mode, and even a bistatic mode, where one plane sends and another receives, so the attacker can get in close while not emitting.
Now that's a really hard user interface problem.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpUhIwGjI7U
At this point, they ought to ask if you play War Thunder on the SF-86.
If I'm not mistaken it was a factor in recruiting in general as evidenced by another leak.
This originated from this reddit thread and has been proved as fake.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Warthunder/comments/10j1hqr/congrat...
source: the pinned comment on that thread
These seem like first person source, early-Wikipedia arguments. (Before citation guidelines came into full effect)
I.e. How do you correct something that you know to be wrong, when you can't point to something public?
Except, in the case of classified military technical specs -- just let it be wrong.
Again? Intelligence people are sleeping on the job if they're not scraping those forums all day every day.
I really doubt there’s anything meaningful coming out of these documents. It’s not going to change any literally a single country spends their military budget
I don’t think anyone is concerned about budgets. Having intimate details into the systems of these craft and understanding how they operate in great detail makes it much easier to 1. Copy it, 2. Defend against it, 3. Find critical vulnerabilities in its design, 4. Build offensive systems that take advantage of any shortcomings, 5. Fast tracks their own jet fighter programs (which to your point does affect budgets because someone else had paid for the R&D)
The same is true for any IP/competitive advantage.
It’s funny how in our industry security through obsecurity is a thing we avoid, but other industries are literally built on the foundation of hiding information in order to stay ahead
We avoid it because there are better ways, not because security through obscurity isn't security. Sometimes, obscurity is all you have.
Also because so much of software is uniquely poorly suited to obscurity. Attackers will often be able to probe the "obscure" system at their leisure trying to reverse it, or in non-SAAS cases get their hands on the actual (compiled) algorithm itself. And once you figure it out every single copy works exactly the same.
It's not like trying to measure the penetrating capabilities of a tank round, where you need physical access to a batch of large, expensive, explosive, tightly controlled objects to figure it out.
Everything is open source* if you know assembly, so to speak.
Edit: *source available
At least some classified stuff is well known to other country's intelligence services, friend, neutral, and foe. It can be so far out of the bag, it's had kittens.
Lot of stuff is classified not because it would actually prevent other nations from finding out stuff, but to hide from the American people and press embarrassing things like how much money is being spent on that particular project or weapons system, how much of a failure it has been, how much toxic waste is being created in its manufacture, and so on.
There's also all the stuff Internet Armchair Intelligence Officers think is "sensitive" or "classified."
China has access to all of our tech leaks, and yet, they cannot replicate it, neither can Russia, heck Russia has these really powerful jet planes... but they got less than a handful of them, and their GDP is comparable to the state of Florida's GDP.
> yet, they cannot replicate it, neither can Russia, heck Russia has these really powerful jet planes
Russia has powerful Soviet-era planes. Their new kit is demonstrably crap, being unable to establish even air supremacy against a foe wielding handfuls of decades-old air defence equipment.
There is also a P != NP difference between replicating a war machine and reverse engineering it sufficiently to defeat it, e.g. designing a radar that mitigates its stealth.
It’s probably some other intelligence agency leaking it.
The siren call of proving someone wrong on the internet strikes again.
what law is it again? where if you want the right answers to come out, spam people with wrong answers? lol
It has been _0_ days since classified information was leaked on the War Thunder forums.
If a forum has it, foreign agents already had it.
The forum has it not because it's common knowledge but because people with top secret clearance happen to frequent the forum and like to talk about/boast about the tech they work with.
An enemy state's ability to get an agent deep inside the military, or to entice someone already inside to turn traitor, or to hack through the layers of security to extract data over the network is largely disconnected from an insider's desire to chat about what they did at work.
I'd expect a enemy state's ability to get information out of a system would in fact be correlated with insider's desires to chat about what they did at work. Find some bloke who is a bit lonely, a bit talkative and has good security access, send out a hot woman with an unexpected interest in military specifications. I'm no spymaster but that seems like something a spy agency could manage. Might be able to grab a stickynote with a few key passwords on it to sweeten the operation.
Maria Butina demonstrates that the woman doesn't need to even be particularly hot ...
Even better a woman who kinda looks like the target’s ex - a duper hot woman stands out and might activate the bloke’s memory of training. Spies whole thing is to blend in, appear unremarkable.
> The forum has it not because it's common knowledge but because people with top secret clearance happen to frequent the forum and like to talk about/boast about the tech they work with.
Not really. The forum has it because the low-level maintenance grunts are on the forums and like talking about the thing they work on, and don't think of the manual as some super-secret state secret because honestly it mostly isn't, and is classified out of habit rather than out of deep thought.
> An enemy state's ability to get an agent deep inside the military, or to entice someone already inside to turn traitor, or to hack through the layers of security to extract data over the network is largely disconnected from an insider's desire to chat about what they did at work.
It's hardly "deep inside", and an enemy state is surely capable of befriending some low-level military personnel, at which point they'll say much the same technically-classified-but-not-super-important things to their in-person friends as they do on internet fora.
> don't think of the manual as some super-secret state secret
The bright-red “classified” markings they include in their dumps suggest otherwise. It’s edgy because it’s demonstrably subversive.
> but because people with top secret clearance
The kind of stuff being leaked on War Thunder forums is generally Restricted or Confidential at best
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I know this is serious, but this trope is kinda hilarious to me. Someone needs to prove themselves right so badly that they risk prison time by posting classified docs.
Depending on where they're located and how they came into position of the classified file it isn't necessarily a criminal offense.
Depends entirely on what kind of connections you have. The government will happily waive rules to let you off the hook, or raid your dwelling early in the morning with guns drawn, then stage evidence if need be.
This is going to keep happening, isn't it?
My big takeaway from this is that War Thunder is only 200 employees. I know this is a massive income generating game so I'm googling around..
I found this post from Dec 2023 that has a mention of 121 million euros net revenue. > https://steamcommunity.com/app/236390/discussions/0/40347264... it's specifically referencing ONLY Hungarian income data for the company directly- https://www.ceginformacio.hu/cr9311454780_EN
If you look at that today in 2024- https://www.ceginformacio.hu/cr9311454780_EN
It's 137,097,280 euros a year today. $131 million revenue with 200 employees.. I've worked at 1200-2500 employee companies that were 10ths of that, if that.
Gajin has companies all over the world, I'm assuming this is only their hungarian revenue. I don't know if its only their hungarian employees, I assume so..
edit: I just noticed the ceginfomacio.hu link shows 56 people, 1 owner reported 1/1/2023. So, 56 hungarian employees?
My pet conspiracy theory about these leaks is that the military uses WarThunder as a training sim, and every now and then someone notices the physics/render is off so they "leak" the specs knowing some gaming nerd is going to fix it for them.
The developers never make changes based on these leaks.
Why would they use an arcade like War Thunder when DCS exists?
Yeah, both Arma 3 and DCS World have commercial versions of their simulators for the armies to train on.
I can't speak for Arma but DCS isn't even close to accurate enough to count as a qualified simulator. It's a nice toy, but still a toy.
Source? I've never heard of either having such a version.
AI written article that's a poorly reused template of earlier story, applied to not-actually-classified information. And we're 44 comments in and most someone has noticed is observing it sounds like "early Wikipedia"
We are so fucked
Isnt this tech 20 years old at this point?
The Captor-E AESA variant is not yet in service with the main countries developing it, despite the project starting in 1993.
In fact, only export customers (Kuwait and Qatar) have the Captor-E ECRS Mk0 on their Typhoons so far, Germany and the UK (in particular) are holding out for future improvements, and are scheduled to get later versions, so they still have the mech-scanned PESA version as far as I've heard.
I think according to Wikipedia only 10 years old. That's for the latest variant, not sure what was posted
That is not old by military standards
Honestly, this makes me curious to try playing the game. Good advertisement. :)
Military propaganda media (like Top Gun and Call of Duty) seems to be a double edged sword for the state, since the people it works the best on are also most susceptible to compromising secrets due to their deep seated insecurities.
> the people it works the best on are also most susceptible to compromising secrets due to their deep seated insecurities
Can you elaborate on that? Who are the people it works best on? How are deep seated insecurities related to propensity to revealing secrets? Is this just an online thing or is this type of person more likely to reveal secrets in an intelligence operation scenario? How do you know all of this?
It works best on young men who are socially, romantically and sometimes financially struggling. It gives them a sense of power and belonging to the state, something greater than themselves. The same mechanisms that make this propaganda successful can be used (willingly or organically) to cause the effected individual to take other actions. Here someone wanted to brag so they leaked secrets online. One would argue people like Timothy McVeigh were similar, with much different results.
Further reading:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
- https://archive.org/details/aberrationinhear0000pain/page/70...
Financial struggles are a contra-indication for receiving a security clearance however.
That's why I said sometimes financial, because there are people who are well off or at least have it together financially that can still be exploited with propaganda.