‘ Panama Papers’ not hard to purloin
11.5 million documents equal about 260 movies
The 11.5 million leaked documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca are providing a treasure trove of data on a hidden world of offshore accounts and murky dealings. Expect more such leaks in the future. “It’s becoming much easier than it used to be to store and move very large amounts of data. I would expect this to continue,” said John King, a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
The history of such leaks shows a steady increase in their depth and breadth, as information technology has become more sophisticated and allowed more data to be captured and revealed by leakers.
In 1948, spy Whittaker Chambers fam- ously hid two rolls of microfilm in a hollowed- out pumpkin in a pumpkin patch. The film contained just 58 images of State and Navy Department documents.
By 1969, anti- war activist Daniel Ellsberg spent multiple nights laboriously making photocopies of the so- called Pentagon Papers, a 700- page report by the Department of Defense covering U. S. decisionmaking in Vietnam. Excerpts eventually were published in The New York Times and the Washington Post.
WikiLeaks has published nearly 500,000 documents leaked by hackers who attacked Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014.
In 2013 Edward Snowden leaked more than 1.5 million documents from the National Security Agency to the press.
What are being called “the Panama Papers” contain 10 times that amount.
The documents are estimated to contain about 2.6 terabytes of data, according to the Suddeutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper that first obtained them.
It’s not that much data. Ten terabytes would be about 260 HD movies. Today, big- box stores routinely sell solid- state drives that hold 3 terabytes of data and are just a little thicker than a smartphone.
Moving that much data surreptitiously out of a network also isn’t that hard. “If you have the time, you can remove an enormous amount of data in not very much elapsed time because you can take it in chunks,” said King.
According to a report by cyber security firm Mandiant, the median number of days hackers spend inside a system before they’re discovered was 205 in 2015.
That depends on the network, whether the people who own it are watching and what kinds of movement they are used to seeing.
“Transferring 11 terabytes of data wouldn’t even be noticed on the Netflix or Amazon networks, but would stand out pretty quickly most other places,” said Jonathan Sander, vice president of Lieberman Software, a cyber security firm based in Los Angeles.