As the Government’s codelocks use secure codes provided by a Discord command, the list of codes were leaked when the Discord server’s coding was made publicly available on github (in a file titled pin-frequency.js).

An investigation published by the Rust Community Archive (which operates on the Steam platform) found that the series of leaked codes had been taken from a list of the least-commonly used “stolen ATM pins” which ranked how secure each code was.

What doesn’t make sense is how the investigation was made public on Steam, as the platform notoriously flags articles (automatically) for containing any suspicious content, which is so sensitive that a stub for Reptar’s creative works (such as Reptar’s Sky Club) ended up hidden from public viewing due to inexplicably being “flagged for containing potentially harmful content“.

The flagged articles were documented to have gotten stuck in this manner unless the author appealed to Steam agents to have the article reviewed – an issue that the Archive has to deal with every few days. Despite the sensitivity of the system disrupting the publishing of innocent articles (an issue which was forwarded to “members of Valve” in October 2023) somehow the article about stolen ATM pins got through the system.

A Government officer has verified that the list of thousands of codes included ones that the Government had been using, and is quoted as having said that “github practically leaked all potential government codes, from 0001 to 9999.”

Categories: Investigative Journalism