Pentagon: Highly-classified documents leak poses 'very serious' risk to US security

The US Defense Department has issued a stern warning about the threat posed to the country's national security as a result of the recent online leak of dozens of highly sensitive documents.

Chris Meagher, assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, made the remarks on Monday, amid an ongoing probe by the Justice Department into the leak.

The leak features photographs of dozens of highly-classified military and intelligence documents on the country's national security and its close allies, which have been surfacing on Twitter, Telegram, Discord and other social media platforms over the recent days.

US assessing impact of highly-classified documents leak on national security, allies: Pentagon

The US says it is assessing the fallout from the recent leakage of highly-classified documents on the country

The data reportedly includes secret information on the war in Ukraine as well as sensitive analyses of US key allies.

One such document states that officials with the Israeli regime's Mossad spy agency supported protests against a controversial judicial reform plan, which was proposed by the regime's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Although, information about the exposure of the data have been surfacing rather recently, some of the documents may have been circulating online for weeks, if not months.

The documents circulating online pose "a very serious risk to national security and have the potential to spread disinformation," Meagher said.

"We're still investigating how this happened, as well as the scope of the issue. There have been steps to take a closer look at how this type of information is distributed and to whom," he added.

The data leak has been described as one of the most serious security breaches since more than 700,000 documents, videos, and diplomatic cables appeared on the WikiLeaks whistleblower website in 2013.

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The White House national security spokesman John Kirby told journalists that President Joe Biden had been briefed on the leak "late last week."

Kirby added that the US administration is worried that there may be more documents to come.

"We don't know who's responsible for this. And we don't know if they have more that they intend to post," Kirby said, adding, "Is that a matter of concern to us? You're darn right it is."

Potential 'deadly' fallout

The fallout from the leak could be significant -- even deadly -- potentially putting US intelligence sources at risk while giving the country's foes valuable information.

"Disclosure of sensitive classified material can have tremendous implications not only for our national security, but could [also] lead to people losing their lives,"  Meagher said.

He added that a Pentagon team is working to determine if the documents are genuine, noting, however, that images circulating online seemed to show sensitive information.

"Photos appear to show documents similar in format to those used to provide daily updates to our senior leaders on Ukraine and Russia-related operations, as well as other intelligence updates," he said, adding that some of them "appear to have been altered."

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