Most likely a systems administrator, who if he/she is smart left the company months ago and hopefully moved overseas. Keep in mind that nowadays 2.6TB can fit onto a tiny 2.5 inch HD or SSD.
The movies told me you needed Tom Cruise, some lasers, a hacker in a van “jacked in to their network” and a beautiful mole to distract the guards/steal a password/add a touch of class to the proceedings.
Actually, you need one pissed off guy and a memory stick.
Yes, that amount of data is still too large to be likely to have been removed remotely.
I don’t believe you can get a 2.5" SSD that large - 2 TB is the largest IIRC - but 3 TB and 4 TB external 2.5" HDDs are available. More concealable would be 512 GB SD cards.
An additional likely suspect would be a disgruntled secretary or similar.
That said, whoever leaked this has undoubtedly angered some very powerful and very nasty people, so I doubt they will live long.
It’s interesting to speculate on how this was done. 6 SD cards could be sufficient, but it may not be that simple.
From the Süddeutsche Zeitung website:
It sounds like it was leaked to Süddeutsche Zeitung slowly, in some manner not mentioned. So why not just mail 6 cards in a padded envelope? Why leak it slowly? Was it stolen slowly and leaked as it was being stolen?
At first glance, that seems foolish. One would think that you’d want to be long gone before leaking anything, in case the leaking is exposed somehow.
Maybe, for some reason, the leaker could only access the data in smaller pieces over time, and wanted to get as much out as quickly as possible in case he was caught or his access was shut down somehow. It’s even conceivable that he did lose access at some point and the 2.6TB isn’t everything he could have gotten.
If they even bothered to compress it. 2.6 TB is nothing. I mean, I’m no bank, and I have almost twice as much data storage space sitting on my desk right now.
America is a common law country and Panama is a civil law country. A lot of the people that are involved seem to be in civil law countries. With that said, there are plenty of Americans hiding money in Switzerland so it might not mean anything.
Remember the guy that got arrested for setting up wealthy clients with swiss bank accounts? He got $104 million from the IRS for helping them recover almost a billion dollars in tax revenue. Whoever leaked this information could become a billionaire with this information (the US is not the only country with whistleblower awards for tax evasion).
Yes, but he or she would have to reveal themselves to collect any reward, and dollars are worthless if you’re dead; and we know that Putin, for example, can seemingly have people killed wherever he wants.
You’d have to live in the shadows wondering if your next Starbucks latte will contain a dose of polonium.
It may or may not be true of Panamanian law firms (and/or Fonseca specifically), but US law firms are very, very bad at cybersecurity. My educated guess is that something like 5% are adequately protected against outside intrusions.