Pierluigi Paganini November 20, 2019

New data leak threatens the world of finance after the Panama Papers, hackers published 2TB of the Cayman National bank’s confidential data.

The Cayman Islands are a fiscal paradise that attracts money of questionable origin from all over the world, for this reason, the content of a new data leak is scaring the global finance.

The Cayman National has a branch on the Isle of Man that focuses in offshore banking.

Hackers that go online with the handle Distributed Denial of Secrets have published 2TB of confidential data belonging to the Cayman National bank.

The Distributed Denial of Secrets group started releasing the materials on Saturday, it claimed that documents leaked contain evidence of money laundering by Russian oligarchs and other important people worldwide.

Distributed Denial of Secrets didn’t hacked the systems at the Cayman National, the group only released information that were stolen by the popular hacktivist “Phineas Fisher.” Phineas Fisher is the same hacker that breached the surveillance firms HackingTeam and Gamma Group.

“Unicorn Riot has obtained the small HackBack announcement text released exclusively in Spanish, described as “Desde las montañas del Sureste Cibernético” (‘From the mountains of the Cyber Southeast’). It bills itself as a “HackBack” DIY guide for “Una guía DIY para robar bancos” (‘A DIY guide for robbing banks.’)  The announcement begins with a tongue-in-cheek dedication to “Subcowmandante Marcos” with an ASCII text-styled pipe-smoking cow referring to former Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos.” reported the website Unicorn Riot.

“Also included in the announcement were introductions to common information security tools such as Metasploit and observations about previous major bank hacks, suspicious activities on SWIFT (an international financial network), and art such as a skeleton saying “Be Gay, Do Crimes” in Spanish.”

Distributed Denial of Secrets obtained the cache in two tranches for a total of about 2.21 Terabytes, it calls the leak Sherwood. Torrent file has been released here and mirrored by archive.org, with more info at Pastebin.)

“From the entire data set, an analysis of the locations of over 1,400 client accounts was released to Unicorn Riot including 780 from Isle of Man, 272 from Cyprus, 153 from the UK, 107 from the Cayman Islands, 51 from the British Virgin Islands, 12 from the Seychelles, 11 from the United States, 7 from Belize, 7 from Ireland, and a small number from other jurisdictions involved in offshore banking including Gibraltar, Jersey, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, Guernsey, Malta, and Mauritius.” continues Unicorn Riot.

“The XLS spreadsheet file, on its additional tabs, also includes detailed financial information about more than 3800 companies, trusts and individual accounts managed by Cayman National for clients around the world, including account balances. “

Cayman National doesn’t acknowledge the data leak, but experts noticed that many of its services would be unavailable on November 17 because of “a major upgrade and maintenance programme.”

Stay tuned …

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Cayman National bank, data leak)

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