Apoorva Singegol Writes: In the last few weeks the leak of the documents from the Panamanian Law firm reveals as to how the elite and powerful people launder money, dodge sanctions and how they are indulging in illegal tax activities.
It was a year ago that some anonymous source contacted the German Newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), and offered the internal encrypted documents from Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca (off shore law firm). As the months rolled on, the data leakage grew so much that the 2.6 terabytes of data surpassed the combined total of the wiki leaks cablegate, offshore leaks, lux leaks and Swiss leaks. This leak provided an insight into the global industry which manages the accounts of the world’s elite class of people from various fields. The 11.5 million leaked documents, revealed names of thousands of people across the world which included the politicians, celebrities’, FIFA officials and professional athletes, who had evaded tax and had taking help from the law firm, Mossack Fonseca. This included the names of about 500 Indians, prominent amongst them being Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Amitabh Bachchan, K P Singh, promoter of DLF, politicians like Shishir Bajoria and Anurag Kejriwal and many more.
The impacts of the leaked documents are far reaching, but this is surely a wakeup call, which Snowden had provided long back in 2013. Emily Orton, Director at the Dartrace, told CBR (Computer Business Review): “A lack of awareness and visibility of digital interactions and data remains responsible for major risks to companies in all sectors. This latest leak at Mossack Fonseca must again reinforce cyber security as a question of boardroom importance.”
It is after these revelations; that the cyber security experts are thinking over and calling for the senior leadership to better understand the cyber security requirements, strategy and technology. Companies, legal force and others must accept that no company is immune from attack. Nick pollard, General manager UK for Guidance Software, told CBR: “For any organization, it’s about not only having policies in place for data protection, but also enforcing these correctly.. ”
Thus in order to have a strong Cyber Security of the Data, firstly the firms should wake up and look into its existing cyber security policies and then make necessary changes. They need to make the policies strong and efficient and enforce the policies in a right way. They should make the employees aware of this threat and give them necessary training to handle the cyber security of the data under their hands effectively for example -how to spot, block and report any suspicious activity if seen, timely.
References
https://www.quora.com/What-is-Panama-Paper-leak-from-Indian-angle
http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/56febff0a1bb8d3c3495adf4/