Classified fighter jet specs leaked on War Thunder forums | Hacker News Reader

Classified fighter jet specs leaked on War Thunder forums

ukdefencejournal.org.uk

202 pointsTrasmatta82 comments

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.

Pretty much. The reason why these "leaks" get mentioned so much is because the idea of leaking classified documents on a video game forum is mildly amusing. The game is popular among people enrolled in the military, so it's not implausible that someone would leak documents for laughs and clout.

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

Never ask a question of a friend when you know the answer will be a lie.

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

> Now that's a really hard user interface problem

I'm not sure whether or not you meant this, but it would be a hard (/interesting) user interface problem in the planes themselves, never mind the game. Especially the bistatic mode.

>> and even a bistatic mode, where one plane sends and another receives, so the attacker can get in close while not emitting.

That is one concept. The tactics of bistatic radar are far more complex, with many possible modes for many different situations and advantages.

And in order to prove a point, one of you will post the link to the full schematics and manuals. This is exactly what the article describes.

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.

> I.e. How do you correct something that you know to be wrong, when you can't point to something public?

Shake my head, and accept that it's enough hn/reddit for today.

You don't have to correct everything all the time, especially if it is a sensitive matter. Correcting Covid information 2-3 years ago was a one way ticket to being cancelled everywhere, for example. One needs to accept that being right is not something to prove every single time. Remember Galileo.

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?

The reason every game studio is trying to force their way into a "Live service" game that hits big is because they are basically unmatched when it comes to profit per unit effort. Whales will pay ANYTHING to buy EVERYTHING you offer, and everything you offer took literally an afternoon for your cheapest artist to throw together.

Honestly Gaijin isn't even the worst offender in this regard. Sure the game is so goddamned grindy that you basically HAVE to spend money if you ever want to play with the fun toys at the top of the tech trees, but a new plane model based on a real machine definitely takes more implementation effort than a hat.

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.

I can confirm, as someone who collects Soviet era electronics and buys replacement parts. Russian manufacturing is really bad now and very far from what it was during the Soviet era. Perhaps in part because of past cooperation between various countries of the communist block that is no longer there. For example Belarus and Poland made a lot of the integrated circuits(chips) back then. There are certain items, for example military radios like the R-140M almost every country had a local version of. For example the Russian version still used a vacuum tube as a delay timer well into the 80s while the Polish version had a box of digital logic.

Can I ask how you even got into such a thing?

Just get a HAM radio license :)

To a large extent China has been able to replicate.

China has faced less strict sanctions and has been able to engage in much more aggressive academic and industrial espionage than post-Soviet Russia. It remains to be seen whether, now that sanctions have ramped up, and access to Western/Japanese research and expertise is being curtailed, they can maintain what they've already replicated, never mind build on it to make newer and better things.

China simply outspends russia a hundred times over. When you account for china's full security budget it's almost the same as US defense spending when accounting for PPP.

China is also the world's factory and many components of modern weapons are dual use goods of which China is the supply chain. The problem that no one dares speak is that there is no wholly domestic supply chain for most electronics and other components anymore. If war were to break out with China US defense production would halt immediately.

I just really doubt this when it comes to China.

Betting against China being able to build anything at this point seems pretty dumb.

Almost delusional I would say.

Why? Have you not seen how low quality the things they build are? Among gun collectors, Chinese made guns are considered a fat joke, unreliable. Guns of all things, they invented gun powder!

Then there's buildings, literally fall apart out of nowhere. Their standards of building things are very shockingly bad. There is no motivation to do high quality work.

There was the hospital they built during COVID that collapsed after 3 months.

Those problems aren't limited to China. Just look at the crumbling infrastructe of the 'west'. Besides that they do produce high-quality stuff, even if only specified to that level by 'western' investors/corporations.

There is one meaningful thing coming out of these documents; WarThunder has become a reliable form of education in “how to evaluate information distribution restrictions regarding militarily-applicable topics” for the generations that grew up without the events of PGP / ITAR fresh in mind.

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

Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

From https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

I was really hoping you'd quote the wrong law. That would have been a sigma move.

Thing is, this law way predates the internet. It’s a human nature thing.

As a long time product manager, I’ve always found that the best way to get engineering engagement on a P1-to-me, P2-to-engineering issue is to propose my own solution. Someone is bound to solve the issue just to prove my solution wasn’t the right one.

It has been _0_ days since classified information was leaked on the War Thunder forums.

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.

US government only raids peoples homes (other than those in the US) for really serious crimes like copyright infringement

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.

A hot woman with an unexpected interest in military specifications is unexpected and therefore suspicious. Their interest in the protagonist will be equally unexpected.

Some dudes on a forum about military games having an interest in the same? Totally normal.

> but because people with top secret clearance

The kind of stuff being leaked on War Thunder forums is generally Restricted or Confidential at best

> 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.

The commenter said "... they are classified out of habit" and you omitted that in your reply. I think it is a fair point to consider.

20s on the difference between the captor-m and captor-e, with lasers. Remember to unmute.

https://youtu.be/5l8LdM9_3PU

This is going to keep happening, isn't it?

yes, yes it is.

Glad to read that a russian game is well known around the world and regularly gets in the news.

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

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.

The devs cannot make the game match the reality, because that would be very very unfair for the people who play non-NATO countries. The game needs a semblance of balance.

At least at one point, Russian tanks in the game had just free magic armor to protect the ammo carousel from cooking off from literally any hit. "Spall" and damage fragments would just magically not trigger the ammo cookoff, specifically on some Russian tanks.

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.

It doesn't really change the fact that quite a few militaries license "MCS", the military version of the simulator for training purposes (and it probably funds DCS development as a side project).

You could even see it now in photos with Ukranian pilots, most likely for F-16 cockpit familiarization.

Remember that pilots spend quite a bit of time practicing on printed out posters of cockpits and DCS is quite better than that ;)

Source? I've never heard of either having such a version.

For Arma it's VBS, but the games company (Bohemia Interactive) and the simulator company (Bohemia Interactive Simulations) have been seperate for quite some time, so VBS is based on older Arma titles.

IIRC the PLA actually used modded Arma 3 for training.

For Arma: https://bisimulations.com/products/vbs4

For DCS World: https://www.cymstar.com/what-we-do/simulation-products/cymli...

Isnt this tech 20 years old at this point?

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

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.

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.