Australian cybersecurity vendor Nuix has announced that its data analysis aided investigators in breaking the Panama Papers this week.
Journalists from German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists worked for over a year to uncover the inner-workings of secretive Panama-based financial company Mossack Fonesca. The leaked papers reveal some of the world's most rich and famous that have hidden their money in offshore tax havens.
The investigation sparked from an anonymous leak of 11.5 million documents, totalling 2.6TB of data.
Sydney-headquartered Nuix donated its big data analysis software Investigator Workstation to investigators in order to work through the massive data trove in a reasonable timeframe.
The software allows users to analyse data in various formats in a single interface and search for relevant terms and information from millions of documents.
A Nuix consultant also advised investigators on hardware configurations and workflows during the investigation, but had no direct access to the trove of data.
“Nuix technology was an indispensable part of our work on the Panama Papers investigation, as it has been with Offshore Leaks and many of our other in-depth investigative stories,” said ICIJ director Gerard Ryle.
Nuix director of eDiscovery products Angela Bunting said the vendor has worked with investigators for the past 10 to 12 years, but did not realise how large the Panama Paper leak was.
“We were given the opportunity to not be involved but provide software, unaware of what we were engaging with but knew we were working for the greater good,” said Bunting.
“An investigation of this kind may have taken years for journalists to scratch the surface otherwise.”
Founded in Sydney in 2000, Nuix has an office in the UK, Ireland, Germany and four US locations. Its reseller partners in Australia include KPMG and Redeye Forensics.
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