The Panama Papers claimed their first high-profile scalp yesterday, as Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned over allegations that his family sought to conceal large amounts of money in offshore accounts.
How the Panama Papers leaked remains unclear, and presumably under investigation. The law firm whose papers they were—Mossack Fonseca—has called the incident "an email server hack" and definitely not an inside job. But this brief statement leaves a great deal unexplained.
How journalists sifted through the enormous trove of documents is perhaps a bit clearer. At any rate, Nuix says that its big data analysis tool Investigator Workstation was used by the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as they developed the story over the past several months.
Security industry observers see the incident as a clear instance of two trends: first, the enormous quantity of highly sensitive information law firms hold, and, second, the relatively porous defenses with which those firms surround that information.
Avast warns that a malicious search-engine-optimization (SEO) campaign is attacking vulnerable WordPress and Joomla installations.
Some one hundred problematic Android apps have been found in the Google Play Store. Google has also booted the popular Chrome extension Better History after it was found to be hijacking browser sessions and redirecting users to ad pages.
Customized ransomware—which now calls its intended victims by name—has, Proofpoint researchers warn, turned up in spearphishing campaigns.
US NSA Director Rogers has recommended that Congress designate U.S. Cyber Command a Combatant Command.