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Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

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Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#91

Post by boring_twenties »

askytb wrote: post #68
walrus01 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cayman Islands is a vassal state of the global one percent as a tax shelter. Let's call it what it really is. It's not a global financial center the way NYC or Hong Kong or Tokyo are. It's a sand bar with a bunch of post office box company registries and some banks. I hear there is also good snorkeling.

>is a vassal state of the global one percent as a tax shelter Just FYI, to be in the global one percent you need an income of $32,400 per year

Individual or household?

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#92

Post by CaymanCruiser »

bikeshaving wrote: post #80
CaymanCruiser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two dimensions here, one is the tax liability and the second is regulatory compliance. Yes, the tax liability is significantly reduced when using offshore structures and I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing especially since an ultra-low corporate tax rate makes it possible to offer our customers services at a lower price than otherwise - I see this as a good thing. The second is that regulatory compl…

> an ultra-low corporate tax rate makes it possible to offer our customers services at a lower price than otherwise - I see this as a good thing. The claim that you’re transparently passing the savings of tax avoidance onto consumers rather than charging market-rate and pocketing the difference is both unlikely and unprovable. And even if you were charging less, this would essentially amount to an unfair, extra-legal…

> ...unfair, extra-legal competitive advantage.

It is not unfair, and it is not extra-legal. Anyone can offshore their company and in some cases it can take less than an day (incorporating an LLP in the UK takes a couple of hours) with virtually zero barriers of entry, all fully compliant with the relevant legislation.

If legal regulatory arbitrage (through tax havens) is unfair, then the corollary is that any kind of business profit arising from utilising uncommon knowledge is unfair. I think this position is untenable.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#94

Post by edoceo »

mcphage wrote: post #85
gxqoz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent piece in The Guardian argues that South Dakota and other US states are actually becoming the go-to place to store anonymously your illicit cash and make sure that your heirs can inherit it without taxes forever: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-amer... Partly because the US has compelled other countries to provide more transparency without joining that transparency organization itself.…

> This loophole was unintentional That seems a pretty hard pill to swallow.

Laws can have bugs too

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#95

Post by seibelj »

jxramos wrote: post #89
seibelj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can’t believe it’s legal to move from SF to Texas if you were born and raised in SF. You owe the good people of San Francisco repayment for raising and nurturing you. Leaving after all that education and local services is a corrupt tax-dodge into a state without income tax.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Un...

There’s legality and morality. Moving all my wealth to Cayman (or Texas) may be 100% legal but I thought we were debating ethics. All of these HNers decamping from NYC and SF to Florida and Texas are horrible awful people depriving the local governments of California and New York their deserved taxes!

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#96

Post by rootsudo »

hurrdurr2 wrote: post #7
m0zg wrote: post #5

This is going to be swept under the rug faster than Epstein, assuming it even surfaces in the mainstream press at all. Lots of rich people run their stuff through the Cayman Islands, probably more than through Panama. So far, as far as I can tell, no mention in the US. The entire front pages of major national newspapers (WaPo and NYTimes) are dedicated to their single-minded mission of telling everyone that orange ma…

Regrettably the media needs to publish what gets the most clicks; unfortunately what gets the most clicks these days is partisan stories that gets readers riled up. That Panama leak story was also quickly "forgotten" by the MSM.

Panama Papers/leaks were same story - most of the law firms clients were not Americans.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#97

Post by hogFeast »

pavlov wrote: post #73
CaymanCruiser wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I have a fair bit of insight into this industry, both from friends, acquaintances, and family who use a variety of offshore structures to manage their wealth and from my own dealings (the company I founded and currently manage is offshored for tax and legal purposes). What people don’t realise is that aside from a couple outliers offshore jurisdictions aren’t that shady at all a…

> ...the United Kingdom being the leader here. Having lived in the UK, I'm convinced that the real reason for Brexit is to preserve these offshore tax havens from any meddling by EU regulations. It's not an accident that Brexit suddenly became crucially important to the Conservative Party only when the EU developed a new interest in unified financial regulations after all the turmoil of 2008-2011.

The EU has an unbelievable number of tax havens. It is one of the last places in the developed world where you can genuinely clean dirty money with ease.

The last Commission President was literally the ringleader for tax theft: he was FM/PM of Luxembourg, and actively lobbied companies to domicile there, funnel revenue through Luxembourg (i.e. structuring for tax avoidance alone), and personally negotiated the 1% corporation tax deals.

...it always amazes me how little people actually understand about the EU.

Btw, the main issue for the Conservatives has been their inability to force the overseas territories to do things (what they actually think about tax havens is irrelevant now, events have moved on).

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#98

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

_8j50 wrote: post #86
tetha wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the scary part about this is: After Equifax, this is another big hack... and practically, it's one layer of defense and that's it. Shellshock, one password, everything's fucked. And yes, expletives are appropriate there. The rest is largely access maintenance, keyloggers and execution. That's scary. Maybe I'll need to badger my boss about a serious pentest of everything.

Dude, forget a pentest, have a security architect look things over. Simple segmentation and endpoint firewall witha good edr might have stopped this. Everyone misses the basics, a lot of networks were pieced together 10+ years ago when people were not as security conscious as they are now.

Our first pen test, before I took over as CTO... We had a JSON file with admin credentials on a shared drive. IT company needed it there so some tool could log in as admin and do some robot work.

Fired them, and good riddance. But... STUPID SIMPLE things can get overlooked for years until you have someone else come in and test.

+1 for pentests.

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#99

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

iudqnolq wrote: post #27
1000units wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epstein wasn't a normal prisoner. None of this is particularly relevant.

Ken White addresses this. Even with high profile prisoners, guards face minimal accountability in the US prison system.

Did the "malfunctioning" cameras also just not fear accountability?

Re: Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank

#100

Post by kneel »

CaymanCruiser wrote: post #76
52-6F-62 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tax and legal purposes This may be terribly naive, but doesn't that make the business de-facto illegal? What kind of legitimate business deserves to buck paying into the systems that support them? As a default I want to disagree, but I would like to know what business needs to operate outside of these constraints. Surely the businesses utilizing the favours of banks like Cayman are not being operated within tyranni…

>This may be terribly naive, but doesn't that make the business de-facto illegal? What kind of legitimate business deserves to buck paying into the systems that support them? As a default I want to disagree, but I would like to know what business needs to operate outside of these constraints. These constraints that you speak of are entirely arbitrary (geographical delineation) and were designed for a time before the…

>I would instead ask the question why Western governments are refusing to get with the changing tides and reform their archaic taxation codes to account for an increasingly globalised economy.

Systemic corruption, governments are infested with corporate interests and tax avoiders.

Attempting to even the playing field would expose massive corruption.

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