A 10-terabyte data dump on Trump, Russia hyped by ‘Anonymous’ isn’t real

Accounts claiming ties to the hacking collective Anonymous announced the release of 10 terabytes of data that expose Russia, President Donald Trump, and corruption across the globe.

Which would be big, if true. But the data doesn't match the claim.

On Tuesday, the X user @YourAnonTV, an account with nearly 492,000 followers, asserted that a data cache containing "information on all businesses operating in Russia, all Kremlin assets in the West, pro-Russian officials, and more," was released online.

The claim was quickly circulated by other prominent accounts including @YourAnonCentral, a user known for spreading sensationalized and false claims to their 5.2 million followers, who added that Trump had been swept up in the leak as well.

"In defense of Ukraine Anonymous has released 10TB of leaked data on all businesses operating in Russia, all Kremlin assets in the West, pro-Russian officials, Donald Trump, and more," the account wrote.

A link to the supposed archive, titled "Leaked Data of corrupt officials," shows a compressed file less than 19 gigabytes in size. The source of the alleged hack appears to be a little-known X user with the handle @CyberUnknown45.

In one of their most recent posts, @CyberUnknown45 claimed that the total size of the hacked data had actually increased to 11.5 terabytes.

A standard book page holds around 2,000 characters or 2,000 bytes of data. For comparison, 11.5 terabytes of data would fill up 5.75 billion pages.

But it turns out the alleged leak isn't new. @CyberUnknown45 has been posting about the cache as far back as December 2023.

Over their X timeline, @CyberUnknown45 provides regular updates to data he's added to the cache, which largely appears to be already public information scraped from websites as well as hacks and leaks from others.

Data experts who have examined portions of the archive agree that the characterizations currently being made online are highly inaccurate.

Emma Best, co-founder of the journalism collective DDoSecrets, the world's largest public library of hacked and leaked information, noted in a post on Bluesky that folders in the archive included odd names such as "Dominoes pizza."

Best also examined folders that alleged to contain "leaked data" on Trump, ex-Republican lawmaker Matt Gaetz, and rapper Kanye West.

The files, which included scrapes of the trio's social media profiles, showed useless information such as the IP address for instagram.com.

"High quality stuff, y'all," Best wrote. "Can't believe they leaked that <checks notes> Kanye's Instagram is hosted by Instagram.c- Really? I have to waste my time debunking this shit???"

The Daily Dot reached out to @CyberUnknown45 to inquire about the claims online but did not hear back.

Either way, the vast majority of the data is neither new nor sensitive in nature, making the claims online wildly inaccurate.

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