Data security at Mossack Fonseca & Co of the Panama Papers fame
Mossack Fonseca & Co., the Panamanian law firm and corporate
service provider with more than 40 global offices and 600 lawyers worldwide,
has received extensive media attention in April 2016 when an enormous cache
of its documents was provided to news media in the Panama Papers off-shore
tax haven leak.
IT- Security flaws were at heart of
Panama leaks, because the front-end computer systems of Mossack Fonseca
were outdated and riddled with security flaws. The law firm at the centre
of the Panama Papers hack has apparently shown an "astonishing" disregard
for IT-security.
Mossack Fonseca & Co. is the first and only ISO 9001:2008 certified
legal services company
The Panama Papers are a set of 11.5 million confidential documents that
provide detailed information on more than 214,000 offshore companies listed
by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca. The revealed
documents include the identities of shareholders and directors of said
offshore businesses that were allegedly supposed to remain secret.
The documents created since the 1970s that amount to 2.6 terabytes of
data requiring up to 600 DVDs for storage.
The following information is noted on their website on data security.
Your information has never been safer than with Mossack Fonseca's secure
Client Portal.
To ensure we can provide our customers with the most secure and up-to-date
protection available, we house all of our servers in-house. Our Client
Portal encryption certificates use the most powerful secure socket layer
(SSL) encryption commercially available today.
Mossack Fonseca has always provided our clients with the most secure technology
available, and we join the 95% percent of Fortune 500 companies as well
as the world's 40 largest banks who rely on this technology to keep client
information protected. http://www.mossfon.com/about_service/data-security/
The leak involved 2.6 terabytes of data, which is huge. Comparatively,
the WikiLeaks state Department cables released in 2010 amounted to just
1.7 gigabytes of data, which is tiny compared to the 2,600 GB of the Panama
papers.
Though much smaller regarding absolute data size, the Snowden leak has
continued to generate news, stories and revelations three years after
its release. Therefore, with so much information breaking around the world,
and the ongoing analysis of such a massive trove of data, compelling chunks
of breaking news will continue to be revealed for several years to come
with a series of casualties. The first full list of companies involved
in the global scandal will be released in early May 2016.
On the 15th June 2016, we conduct a seminar The IT-Security Day at The
Technical University of Denmark. We will review the corporate cybersecurity
strategy that redefines some of the current problems and outlines the
progress on cybersecurity rather than just offering more platitudes. http://www.riskability.org/2016/it-security/index.htm
