Panama Papers

The website of Panamanian lawyer Mossack Fonseca was hacked. 11.5 million confidential documents that provide detailed information about more than 214,000 offshore companies –  including the identities of shareholders and directors – was made public and made front-page news in every major newspaper in the world.

The documents show how wealthy individuals, including public officials, hide their money from public scrutiny. At the time of publication, the papers identifieded five then-heads of state or government leaders from Argentina, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates; as well as government officials, close relatives, and close associates of various heads of government of more than forty other countries, including Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Syria, and the United Kingdom.

Iceland’s Prime Minister has resigned. Britain’s Prime Minister is having to explain how his family is connected to it. The names of hundreds of Americans have surfaced in the Panama Papers.

Post-mortem analysis found that the hackers got in via a well-known vulnerability in an out-of-date version of a popular WordPress plugin named “Slider Revolution”. The plugin’s authors updated the plugin two years ago and eliminated the vulnerability, but the newer version was never installed on the ‘target’ website.