Panama Papers, documents stolen through old vulnerability … – Macity (Blog)

The study documents the Panamanian Mossack Fonseca and, at the center of the largest flight of the history of finance news, were leaked through vulnerabilities in older versions of Outlook, WordPress and Drupal

the authorities have not yet identified the hacker or hackers thanks to which have been revealed so-called Panama papers, leaked documents from a law firm that deals with the creation and management of offshore companies, the center of a long journalistic investigation that involved dozens of international newspapers.

the company involved, Mossack Fonseca, headquartered in the central American country, would use an old version of Microsoft Outlook (2009) Web App (formerly Outlook Web or Outlook Web access), email client, browser-based, which provides access to Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox from almost any Web browser.

in addition to older versions of services for the management of email, says Forbes, the law firm was exploiting old versions of open source software such as WordPress, Drupal and related plug-ins and scripts (including those dated) with known vulnerabilities and easily exploitable by hackers. Installing Drupal dated win three years ago and had never been updated, a release that has at least 25 known vulnerabilities critical.

The documents obtained (something like 11.5 million documents per second , 6 terabytes of data), up to the amount the biggest leak of the news story. In practice, have been spread more information and documents in this case, compared even to the documents stolen by Edward Snowden about NSA in 2013 or in the case of WikiLeaks, 2010. The information covers 214,000 companies, 14,000 customers and 143 politicians, including heads of state .

Mossack Fonseca says that its activities are not illegal, as they adhere to the rules regarding money laundering and have limited use that its customers are companies that help create and manage .