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When Ecuador cut Julian Assange's internet at its London embassy, something unexpected happened.

The Wikileaks Twitter account, which had previously been commenting on its release of internal US Democrat party emails, instead began tweeting what appeared to be computer code.

The three tweets - accompanied by the words John Kerry, UK FCO (Foreign Office) and Ecuador - led to speculation they could be part of a "dead man's switch": an automated release of information triggered if someone did not regularly "check in" to prove they were alive.

It has been theorized that the automated Twitter messages could relate to Mr Assange's "insurance file" - said to contain information more damaging than anything yet released and automatically made public were anything to happen to him.

It followed the release during the summer of 2016 of a large 88-gigabyte file "seeded" onto "torrent" download sites, where it is rapidly duplicated, meaning it cannot be removed by government authorities, Dr Thorsen says.

"You or I could download the file but without the code it would just be a lot of data that we couldn't access," he said.