Trouble in Paradise

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about yet another breach at a law firm.  This time the firm was Appleby, a law firm based in Bermuda and home to the rich and famous – especially those that are looking for tax shelters and the similar.  Most of these tax shelters are legal but the optics of using them are terrible.  For many of the rich and famous, they don’t want the NOT rich and famous to know what they are doing.

So imagine what happens to a law firm (or any firm) that caters to those people who is hacked and threatened with disclosure.  They likely have some unhappy soon-to-be-ex-clients.

Well at least some of the 13 million plus hacked documents are now public and it paints an unflattering picture.  Likely legal, but very unflattering.

The hack is being called the Paradise Papers.  In sheer size, it is the number two breach, only surpassed by the Panama papers hack in 2016, which revealed 2.6 terabytes of data.  The Paradise Papers hack revealed 1.4 terabytes of data.

Among what was disclosed is:

• Millions of Pounds from the Queen of England’s private estate has been invested in a Cayman Islands fund which makes questionable investments.
• Extensive offshore dealings by Donald Trump’s cabinet members, advisors and donors, including substantial payments from a firm co-owned by Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law to the shipping group of US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross.
• How Twitter and Facebook received hundreds of millions of dollars in investment that can be traced back to Russia.
• The tax avoiding Cayman Islands Trust managed by the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief moneyman.
• A previously unknown $450m offshore trust that has sheltered the wealth of Lord Ashcroft.
• Aggressive tax avoidance by companies like Nike and Apple.

And on and on.

As I said, I assume that most of this is legal, but as people like President Trump and Prime Minister Theresa May have been talking about closing tax loopholes, the optics of this could not happen at a worse time.

According to reports, this does not appear to be state sponsored; just a hacker out to do a little “social justice”.

The message is that any business that stores sensitive information (and apparently the information stolen goes back 70 years) probably ought to look at how you are protecting it and improve that security – unless you want to be the next P papers – Pentagon Papers, Panama Papers, Paradise Papers ……..

I assume that there will be a large exodus of clients from this firm.

Information for this post came from The Guardian.

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