The Wikileaks site is at least partly hosted on servers based in Russia — servers that it added just one week before the site released thousands of hacked emails from the account of John Podesta , chairman of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, in October of last year according to findings published in an online report on Sunday.
The Podesta emails, while containing no major revelations, revealed members of Clinton’s campaign speaking privately, in frank terms that proved embarrassing and likely damaging to her campaign for president against Donald Trump. United States intelligence agencies, according to a report issued by the Director of National Intelligence in January, concluded that a Russian government-sponsored hacking effort was behind the Podesta leak and other cyber-attacks — which were designed to help throw the election to Donald Trump.
Sunday’s online report, authored by freelance journalist Laurelai Bailey , examined a list of internet IP addresses used by Wikileaks to host its site, which houses numerous large troves of leaked and hacked documents, and found two addresses of servers in Russia and hosted by a company run by an individual named Peter Chayanov .
“Now the actual owner of the IP addresses is a man by the name of Peter Chayanov, whose IP addresses have hosted spammers and hackers, according to my sources, who work in internet backbone companies,” Bailey wrote. “Chayanov’s IP space is a virtual equivalent of a bad neighborhood that makes you lock your car doors when you drive through it. So this further implies a connection to Wikileaks and Russian hackers.”
To read the full report by Bailey, click on this link .
An IP address is a short sequence of numbers which identifies the location of a specific computer on the internet. But each IP address can also be used to “geo-located” the computer using that address, that is, to find the actual computer in the real world.
According to Bailey’s report, an online search turned up, among many others, the following two IP addresses for Wikileaks servers.
wikileaks.org. 600 IN A 141.105.65.113
wikileaks.org. 600 IN A 141.105.69.239
Those IP addresses, according to Bailey’s article, match internet server computers belonging to Chayanov and physically located in Moscow, capital of the Russian Federation.
According to publicly available records published as part of Bailey’s article, the Wikileaks Russian servers were listed as “last modified” on September 30, 2016, meaning that Wikileaks likely began using those servers for web hosting on that date.
The first Wikileaks release of the Podesta emails came on October 7 .
“Wikileaks gained Russian hosting on September 30th 2016, one week before the Podesta emails were made public. Wikileaks got Russian Federation virtual addresses one week before the Podesta emails. Let that sink in,” Bailey wrote.
Due to the highly controversial nature of Wikileaks, Bailey wrote, Chayanov would be allowed to host the site in Moscow only with the knowledge and consent of the Russian government, and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Other IP addresses linked to Wikileaks servers are located in Switzerland and the Netherlands, “countries with strong freedom of speech and transparency laws,” Bailey wrote.
Russia, on the other hand, has a record of suppressing free speech and press freedoms — and dozens of journalists who have challenged the government there have been murdered .
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Bailey’s article was based on information posted on Twitter last Friday by Louis Mensch, a British author and journalist who has also served as a member of parliament from the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party.
Oh hi there @ChayanovPeter just thought I’d let @NSAGov @fbi @cia know I screenshot your entire following follow list as of a second ago pic.twitter.com/cA5L9mgJKA
— Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) March 10, 2017
Mensch also said in a Twitter posting that she believes Chayanov himself may be “Guccifer 2.0,” the unidentified hacker who claimed credit for infiltrating Podesta’s email account as well as the Democratic National Committee email servers last year, and who is believed to be a “front” for Russian intelligence agents, according to the U.S. intelligence findings.
There is every possibility that Chayanov is also #Guccifer2 , as the cherry on top. #FISA https://t.co/kzTpFSMtIf
— Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) March 13, 2017
Last week, longtime Trump advisor and close friend Roger Stone admitted that he had been in contact with “Guccifer 2.0” during the presidential campaign last year. Another close Trump associate, British far-right politician Nigel Farage, also last week met secretly with Wikileaks founder and chief Julian Assange at the Ecuador embassy in London where Assange is living under political asylum.
[Featured Image By Russia Today/AP Images]