Two high school students in the southwestern city of Gwangju are under investigation after being caught hacking into their teachers’ notebook computers to steal exam papers, police and municipal …
The Pandora Papers, a huge cache of data containing secret details of offshore bank accounts and shell companies, is thought to be the largest ever leak of tax-haven financial information. The files, stemming from 14 offshore-services firms, were leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which shared them with its partner media outlets (including CBC/Radio-Canada) and began publishing stories on Oct. 3.
But the Pandora Papers isn’t the first such leak. Confidential lists of offshore account-holders have found their way into the hands of journalists and governments a number of times over the last decade and a half. Here are five important previous leaks of records from various tax havens:
What: Records from several dozen jurisdictions held by the global offshore law firm Appleby, which is headquartered in Bermuda, as well as a Singapore-based offshore services provider. The leak also included the corporate registries from 19 countries and territories.
Number of people in data: More than 120,000.
Canadians: 3,000-plus.
Records leaked: 13.4 million.
Who leaked: The records were leaked to the same German journalists who received 2016’s Panama Papers (see below). Their source has not been identified.
Read more:
What: Records from 21 offshore jurisdictions held by a single Panama-based global law firm, Mossack Fonseca.
Entities affected: 214,000 offshore companies, trusts and other entities.
Canadians: 900-plus individuals, corporations and trusts.
Records leaked: 11.5 million.
Who leaked: Journalists from the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung received the leak from an anonymous source who called themself John Doe. The German reporters shared the records with the ICIJ and its global media partners.
Taxes recouped: The Canada Revenue Agency says it’s assessed $29 million in additional tax but won’t say how much of that it has collected.
Read more:
What: Records on 10 different…
A former student at the University of South Wales has been sentenced to 20 months in prison, after hacking into the institution’s computer systems and selling the answers to exam papers for thousands of pounds.
As BBC News reports, 29-year-old Hayder Ali Jasim (sometimes known as Hayder Aljayyash), was studying for a master’s degree in embedded system design at the University of South Wales when he succeeded in gaining unauthorised access to examination papers, coursework, marking and reports.
During lectures in the university’s engineering and computer science faculty, Jasim deployed keyloggers that secretly recorded keypresses, and stored them in a file. In this way, he was able to steal the passwords of university staff.
Between November 2018 and May 2019, Jasim was said to have used the stolen credentials to log in more than 700 times, downloading 216 files.
Jasim monetised the stolen information by working working alongside his fellow student and housemate accomplice, 30-year-old Noureldien Eltarki, who sold copies of the exam papers and answer sheets to students for thousands of pounds.
The hack was only discovered when mathematics lecturer Liam Harris noticed that a number of students had made spelling errors in their answers which matched mistakes the lecturer had made himself on his official answer sheet.
A subsequent investigation into the suspected cheating revealed that login accounts belonging to 17 members of staff had been compromised, and an IP address was linked to a property not far from the university’s campus.
Police arrested Jasim on May 30 2019, and computing equipment and £17,000 worth of cash were seized at the property. A significant amount of stolen university data was subsequently found on the computers found at the address which Jasim shared with Eltarki.
In an interview with the police, Eltarki confessed that he had sold exam scripts to students for as much as £6,500 – with most of the proceeds going to Jasim.
The court was told that the university’s investigation into its data breach, and the subsequent new security measures it had introduced, had cost it over £100,000.
That’s clearly a lot of money for any educational organisation to find itself having…
Academic publishing hardly covers itself in glory, as Techdirt has reported over the years. It takes advantage of researchers’ belief that they need to publish in so-called “high impact” titles for the sake of their careers, in order to pay nothing for the material they provide. Since articles are reviewed by other academics — for free — profit margins are extremely good: around 30-40%. In order to retain these unusually high levels, the industry does everything in its power to undermine and subvert cheaper alternatives like open access, and often takes a heavy-handed approach to the enforcement of “its” copyright — even against the original author. Given this dismal industry background, it will come as no surprise to learn from Science magazine that Russian academic publishing has its own problems, fueled by the bad behavior of authors:
Academic journals in Russia are retracting more than 800 papers following a probe into unethical publication practices by a commission appointed by the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). The moves come in the wake of several other queries suggesting the vast Russian scientific literature is riddled with plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and so-called gift authorship, in which academics become a co-author without having contributed any work.
The article mentions the findings of Antiplagiat, a plagiarism detection company. Antiplagiat looked at over four million academic articles published in the Russian language, and found that more than 70,000 were published at least twice. Some were reused 17 times. That’s an impressively efficient re-cycling of material once it has been written, and saves people the bother of writing new papers, while racking up citations that look good on a CV.
The practice of what is known as “gift authorship” is arguably even more convenient for lazy academics. It involves selling slots on papers already written by other authors that have been accepted by a journal. No work or connection with the research is required. Instead, a site like 123mi.ru acts as a matchmaker between authors willing to sell slots on their articles, and those willing to pay for them. Prices range from around $ 500 to $ 3000 per author slot, depending on the subject matter and the journal — although the latter is only revealed after the slot has been paid for. Some articles allow up to five authors slots to be bought in this way.
Academic publishing in Russia clearly has some serious problems, which undermine its value as a measure of scholarly achievement. Sadly, the same could be said about academic publishing in the West, albeit for different reasons.
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