Remember that five-gigabyte hard drive that WikiLeaks allegedly had that contained damaging information about Bank of America? It appears that that data stash no longer exist, having been destroyed by a former associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after the two men got into a fight.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg told Spiegel Online, a German publication, that the B of A files have been destroyed. WikiLeaks confirmed in a public statement that Domscheit-Berg has the files, and it's trying to negotiate their return. These files supposedly reveal corruption at a "major" bank, which has been widely assumed to be Bank of America. The tale requires a lot of assumptions, since these documents have never been actually released or confirmed to exist beyond the pronouncements of the whistle-blowers.
Domscheit-Berg, who was serving as a spokesperson for WikiLeaks, and Assange got into a dispute several months ago, which led Domscheit-Berg leaving to start his own whistle-blowing operation, taking the B of A information with him, as well as other booty such as a U.S. no-fly list and info on about two dozen Neo-Nazi groups.
While the WikiLeaks Bank of America files have been the subject of much discussion, column inches and web eyeballs over the past year, it's been mostly hype so far. No damaging info on B of A or any bank has actually emerged, and until Domscheit-Berg's announcement this week, the B of A/WikiLeaks story was starting to fade in place of more tangible concerns over economic performance and data breaches that can actually be confirmed.
But earlier this year, the WikiLeaks threat was perceived to be real enough for Bank of America to set up a war room to handle what was expected to be a bombshell release of documents that never came.
Bank of America did not return a request seeking comment by mid-day Tuesday.
One positive impact of the WikiLeaks threat was to draw attention to fraud and data protection technology, which can prove useful given the current spate of data breaches and insider fraud that's affecting banks of all sizes. Insider fraud is hard to spot — Aite estimates it can take up to 18 months to ID internal fraud, and the kind of fundraising transactions that were connected to WikiLeaks are difficult to spot.
As such, new technology is developing that allows institutions to track relationships of suspicious users, such as social network analysis, historical versioning and other Web-driven profiling of bank staff and employees.
In an earlier interview with BTN, Gartner security specialist Avivah Litan said the new technology brings together unstructured data [generally PDF files, emails, blogs] and structured data [generally enterprise information] together to form a picture of what's going on in an environment, giving banks a powerful tool to combat unauthorized internal use.
