Well guess I'm on another watchlist then.

I heard from friends that this is indeed true because they are looking for it in interviews. Definitely quitting war thunder now despite how much I loved making funny skins for meme bombers.

What does playing the game have anything to do with their security leaks?

It's literally in the article.

A ton of classified info has leaked over War Thunder by military and defense contractors going, "Well, actuaaaaally, the way this tank works is..." and then dropping classified docs to prove their point.

It's happened enough times for it to become a red flag and more than some random coincidence.

Yeah I get that, but…

Some people can just play a game and not participate in the forums. So someone else leaked classified documents. Why should other people suffer and not be employed for what somebody else did?

That doesn’t really make sense to me.

Yeah because tech geeks feel an uncontrollable urge to be right. They can't just let it go. They need the information to be correct so they feel a perceived value from all the time they spend I vested in there projects.

Unless you're trying to get in to the defense industry currently, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Just don't read the seemingly classified stuff if you come across it.

That's why the category is 'risk' and not 'threat'. If you were going to be an accountant, no one would care. If you were going to work in the defense industry or for the government working on military stuff and require a clearance, they'd definitely take a close look at you. It probably wouldn't keep you from being hired but it would probably bring you under more regular scrutiny if you have access to 'shareable' documents. It's kind of like complaining about security guards and saying 'I don't see why they should have guards here, I'm not a thief!'

Warthunder players keep leaking sensitive documents

That is fuckin' prefect. The urge to win an internet argument was so strong they violated national security.

*thinks about search history.

I’ll be aight.

You have to be a certain kind of dense idiot to post technical documents or other factual information related to your job to strangers, especially if that is military defense related.

This is probably not true. Their only source is a reddit comment.

If they saw how bad I am at flying in DCS, they’d know I’m definitely a security risk.

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Don't really play a lot of online multiplayer games, but I've been known to pull out a calculator or spreadsheet to prove a point about damage caused by fall damage, or other points in DND, to the chagrin of my fellow DND members. Why play with online people you don't know and get screamed at by a 13-year-old when you can play a board game or ttrgp game in person with a group of people you know pretty well.

Actually, there have been news articles about people getting arrested for leaking documents on classified military secrets before regarding war thunder. A tanker dumped a ton of classified information on a tank to prove a point like 6 months ago.

imagine classifying 22 million people because like 4 leaked national documents

So can a Casio watch.

Isn't everything in the game outdated?

People posted classified info on American, British, Russia, and Chinese tanks. I think there were others.

Basically the ackutually meme guy.

You underestimate just how much people want to win an argument

An exellent cruise missile pilot

Yes but people want to be right

Imagine leaking classified documents to fix a small detail in a videogame.

Pretty sure there was just information on where and how many nukes are stored across Europe on Chegg flashcards online… in the public domain.. these are highschool / college dropouts dont forget

The fact that several people leaked classified documents to prove a point why their beloved vehicle of choice needs a buff (or nerf) in War Thunder is well know and publicized. (It happened several times now)

What isn't established is that as a result playing War Thunder means you are categorized as a security risk.

Should nerf Chinese and North Korean advanced armaments until there’s proof of their capabilities 😏

The sum-total of the 'news' in this article is that an interviewer asked a yes/no question about a game. That 'may' in the title is probably going to buckle under the strain its taking, since we have no idea what the consequences of that question are, there's no indication that it's unto itself a security flag, and we don't even know if there's a follow-up question.

Now, this is just pure speculation, which I suppose qualifies me to write for PCMag, but I'm going to guess there is at least one or two more forks in the interviewer's question script before they declare you a risk to national security.

Leaking classified documents is a crime.

Playing a game whose community members have leaked classified documents is not a crime.

By way of comparison, giving classified documents to the Washington Post is a crime. Receiving classified documents as a journalist at the Washington Post is not a crime. Reading the Washington Post is also not a crime.

There are many honors and awards a game can receive from critics, people's choice, publications, etc.

Being classified as a security risk is a different kind of reward, and a high honor.

Can it get you classed as a National Security Asset? I mean, if I get some Chinese or Russian teenager to reveal otherwise unknown classified data on on some tech, shouldn't I get a little personal bump? You know, nothing crazy. Maybe $50K per instance.

Prove it. Drop some classified documents

One of my first jobs working with the military was to update specs for a lot of assets, planes, missiles, satellites, subs, etc.

Practically everything the public thought something could do they were close but never right. If someone is telling me this one little thing is wrong on a war sim I’m thinking, yeah, that and everything else is not entirely accurate. Good jorb throwing his career away.

Only if u lose alot

> a certain kind of dense idiot

I mean, they work for government, so it checks out.

The vehicle sim community is wild. I've never seen a community have such engrained lines. Like war thunder, many can't take being proven wrong so they gotta pull this shit.

That and the flight sim community got split because all the new games would "water down" the veterans experience with new players.

I love my community

Well the world changed when a handful of idiots crashed a few planes into buildings..why stop there?

I still don't see how anyone can treat that game as a sim in any capacity. It's arcade to the max in every aspect. If there were real ballistic calculations going on against realistic surfaces and physics, the game would be a slideshow at best, let alone all the controls, flight model behaviours and environmental conditions.. it's like people throwing tantrums and realworld specs against Contra III. Makes no sense.

Was there a different game that also had a problem with leaking schematics like this? I'm pretty sure the first time I heard about it was at least a year before the pandemic, but the article says it started in 2021.

I picked up a VR flight sim, and after several hours in it, I’m confident, that given the chance, I could crash a real helicopter.

That's the thing... just because something is classified, doesn't mean it NOT outdated and vice versa.

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I just read through 18 USC 798 and it really does not seem to suggest that the receiving party / 'unauthorized person' is at fault, at least under that law. As I am not a lawyer, could you explain why that is and/or why a layperson's reading is misleading?

Edit: 18 USC 793 and 794 deal with simple possession of "defense information", but not necessarily classified information. Notwithstanding the fact that these descriptions may have significant overlap, is it through this mechanism that you're referencing? ie, are these terms de facto or de jure synonymous, or are they merely commonly mutually applicable?

If I had a nickel for every time someone leaked classified military information on War Thunder forums, I'd have 5 nickels.

Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened 5 times.

But if I don't post classified information to the internet, how will this random guy know that he's wrong?

Especially when everyone is leaving them around these days.

Tbh, I prolly couldnt start it.

Also their source for Raytheon asking about it is a guy said an investigator asked about it.

They don’t ask about it.

In the USA, defense contractors like Raytheon don't even do their own security clearance investigations. The US government does it. This was a bad article all around.

Pretty sure it's easy to distinguish my ADD ass brain hopping from

"how, exactly, does a nuclear fusion reaction work"

To

"Rash." "Rash on arm." "Can you die from a rash on your arm?"

To

"When was the first fuel injected engine made?"

Shit, not like it's illegal to wanna know things.

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No it's not illegal to ask questions and acquire knowledge. Just acquiring some certain knowledge is suspicious.
I do the same thing, coincidentally i have adhd too.

Just googling "lethal dosage of paracetamol" or "bleeding out from neck wound" is kinda suspicious. The anwser is 10-15 seconds if Carotid Artery and Jugular Vein is cut.

That's fucking stupid. So, say someone posts classified documents on a chess forum. Are they not gonna hire anyone who plays chess?

Acetaminophen aka Tylenol for those in the US asking yourself what paracetamol is.

Good to know, thank you.

Getting screamed at by people you know pretty well is a more enjoyable experience.

You are welcome! Just trying to save you the headache of trying to find a lethal dose in the US.

That seems kinda cool. Is it possible to have fun if you have zero idea how to even start playing a flight sim? Or is VR expecting you to already be fluent?

People play sims because they like the complexity, if you are willing to go trough with the learning then you can do it.
If learning how it works and how to operate it seems fun to you, then give it a go.
If you just want to go fast and clear the map of all signs of an enemy contact then probably start with something more arcade-y.
VR its just the image output, the game or sim you are using its what gives it the complexity.

The main thing that takes time to learn in sims is the specifics of the vehicle you're trying to fly, I think it took me a few weeks to really get the planes I have in dcs and I got vr a few months after that, most work after that is rebinding everything that's changed and getting used to it. In dcs no two planes have the exact same set of buttons for everything anyway so there's new bindings no matter what you do. I'm sure if you jumped in with vr from the start it would only add a bit of extra fiddling around.

The person who made the post already came back and said the whole thing was a made up lie….. Some people really need to get better judgment

The source for this story is one person claiming it happened on Reddit. That person has now admitted he made the whole thing up and Raytheon have come out to say it isn't true.

It amazes me that this story got published without the writer doing even the most basic research. I guess the desire to post clickbait is too strong.

And they based the entire article off the claims of one Reddit user who later admitted he made the whole thing up.

Raytheon also denied the story both on their official Reddit account and in a statement given to other news outlets.

If it’s a job that doesn’t require clearance (there’s a lot of them) they just use one of those private services and do a generic background check. If it does require clearance they usually want you to have it when you apply.

The article specifically says, "As part of the security clearance process," which is part of what makes the private investigator claim dubious.

The article also has no idea what it’s talking about because it’s based on a comment that someone made up.

I work at Raytheon with access to the same level of material that’s been leaked on the WT forums (export restricted but not otherwise classified) and my background check was just “upload some documents and we’ll call you if anything comes up”.

It's like 10 or more at this point...

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It's free on Steam !! Great game !!

The article doesn't state that this ever happened. It simply states that the documents (thought to be secret) were posted online proving they weren't that secret.

I'd argue that he doesn't.

I knew nothing about planes before I started, now i know a lot of the fundamentals. Still couldn't fly irl but if I was in a small plane and the pilot passed out, I'd be more confident in landing after playing the sim because i at least know the fundamentals

it does take some research and googling on your own, the sim usually wont teach you much