There are claims that around 8 gigabytes (GB) of data containing audio recordings has been leaked from the Prime Minister House and made available on the dark net for sale.

This comes as multiple audio conversations allegedly between PMLN leaders and other people have surfaced on social media.

The development suggests that the Prime Minister House was bugged. Many journalists have claimed on social media that recordings are from meeting on May this year.

The latest conversation to surface is from a PMLN meeting held at the PM House. Shehbaz Shari, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah, Defense Minister Khawaja Asif, and former National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq could be heard in the leaked audio.

Earlier, a conversation between Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and a person purported to be a senior bureaucrats surfaced on the social media.

The senior bureaucrat inform the prime minister that Maryam Nawaz’s son-in-law, Raheel, is importing machinery from India and it would “draw flak”. Shehbaz Sharif promises to raise the issue with the party.

Shehbaz Sharif concurs the the import is not good for optics.

The bureaucrat tells the PM that Maryam Nawaz Sharif had WhatsApped him and requested two ‘tasks’.

Former information minister and PTI leader Fawad Chaudhry is among the people who claimed that data from the PM House has been made available on dark net for sale.

“The way the office data of the Prime Minister of Pakistan House was offered for sale on the dark web shows the state of cyber security in our country. This is a major failure of our security agencies, especially the IB. Important conversations on political issues as well as topic related to security and foreign affairs are now in everyone’s hands,” he said in a tweet.

Fawad Chaudhry also claimed that the Prime Minister House leaks were being sold at $345,000 on the darknet.

There was no immediate comment from the government on the development.

What is darknet

A Wikipedia definition says that a dark net or darknet is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol.

Two typical darknet types are social networks (usually used for file hosting with a peer-to-peer connection), and anonymity proxy networks such as Tor via an anonymized series of connections.