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The affidavit says that he had access to more documents than he was supposed to because of a "misconfiguration". Or at least, that's what he told the undercover agent.

Given that his access of the documents was logged anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if the misconfiguration was itself a honeypot, using documents that are relatively low-value but still classified.

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Wonder what the content of the documents is if they indeed are a honeypot? Presumably one wouldn’t put any actual secrets but that presents the problem that one would need to know the real secrets to plant fake ones. Additionally the fake ones would implicate some real person, presumably which is problematic if a sophisticated hacker exfiltrated successfully without detection.

I could never get anything done in espionage. I’m far too paranoid.

this type of material is known as 'chicken feed' and it is curated in order to look valuable while not disclosing anything more damaging than necessary.

The article mentions it contains information on how the US performs cyberattacks. I'm sure it's fairly easy to make that look very convincing if you're new at the organization. I mean if it just mentions there's an SSL tunnel into an energy company somewhere, are you going to test if it works or consider it juicy enough to sell?

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