[24][25] Distributed Denial of Secrets was founded by Emma Best, an American national security reporter known for filing prolific freedom of information requests, and Thomas White, an administrator of the Silk Road 2.0.

According to Best, several early members of the project were driven to radical transparency work by their past background with the state, which they compared to Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers.

[33] In December 2019, politicians in Sweden and the UK, including anti-corruption chief John Penrose said that leaks published by Distributed Denial of Secrets showed the need for reforms on company creation and registration.

"[17][48] A June 2020 bulletin created by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis erroneously[14] described them as a "criminal hacker group".

[54] In 2022, law enforcement agencies in New York, New Jersey, Washington and Oregon launched investigations into officers who appeared in the leaked Oath Keepers records published by DDoSecrets.

[14] In June 2020, the organization was banned from Twitter[60][61] in response to BlueLeaks, citing a breach of their policies against "distribution of hacked material"[62] in a move that was criticized as setting a "dangerous precedent.

"[14] In December 2018, DDoSecrets listed a leak from Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs,[69] portions of which detailed the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine at a time when the Kremlin was denying a military presence there.

[71] In January 2019, DDoSecrets published hundreds of gigabytes of hacked Russian documents and emails from pro-Kremlin journalists, oligarchs, and militias.

DDoSecrets partnered with European Investigative Collaborations and the German Henri-Nannen-Schule journalism school to create the Tax Evader Radar, a project to review the dataset of almost one million documents.

[89] On June 19, 2020, DDoSecrets released BlueLeaks, which consisted of 269 gigabytes of internal U.S. law enforcement data obtained from fusion centers by the hacker collective Anonymous.

[94] In February 2021, DDoSecrets gave journalists access to hundreds of thousands of financial documents from the Myanmar Directorate of Investment and Company Administration (DICA).

"[96] On February 28, DDoSecrets revealed "GabLeaks", a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of data from Gab, including more than 40 million posts, passwords, private messages, and other leaked information.

[97] In April 2021, Distributed Denial of Secrets made donor information from the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo available to journalists and researchers.

The information identified previously anonymous high-dollar donors to far-right actors including members of the Proud Boys, many of whose fundraising efforts were directly related to the 2021 United States Capitol attack.

[99][100] The emails revealed that the city's handling of fatal shootings by police officers violates state law and a federal consent decree.

[113] In May 2022, DDoSecrets published 128,700 emails allegedly associated with a Hunter Biden laptop that were being circulated by allies of and former staff of President Donald Trump.

[116] In September, they published Fuerzas Represivas, a collection of military documents from Latin America and Mexico totaling more than 13 terabytes, which Emma Best called "the largest leak in history".

[131][132] In November 2023, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project joined with more than 40 media partners including Cerosetenta / 070,[133] Vorágine,[134] the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP)[135] and Distributed Denial of Secrets and journalists in 23 countries and territories for the largest investigative project on organized crime to originate in Latin America, producing the 'NarcoFiles' report.

The investigation was based on more than seven million emails from the Colombian prosecutor's office which had been hacked by Guacamaya, including correspondence with embassies and authorities around the world.

[140] Also in November 2023, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Paper Trail Media [de] and 69 media partners including Distributed Denial of Secrets and the OCCRP and more than 270 journalists in 55 countries and territories[9][10] produced the 'Cyprus Confidential' report on the financial network which supports the regime of Vladimir Putin, mostly with connections to Cyprus, and showed Cyprus to have strong links with high-up figures in the Kremlin, some of whom have been sanctioned.

[141][142] Government officials including Cyprus president Nikos Christodoulides[57] and European lawmakers[57] began responding to the investigation's findings in less than 24 hours,[56] calling for reforms[57] and launching probes.

The first entry in the project was a November 16, 2023 Reuters story that alleged that a hacking-for-hire firm called Appin had stolen secrets from executives, politicians, military officials, and wealthy elites around the globe and supporting documents.

[14] At the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in June, DDoSecrets announced that the next entry in the Greenhouse Project was mirroring all of WikiLeaks' data after datasets became unavailable to download from the site and Julian Assange's plea deal required the organization to remove information.