The big news of the weekend were reports about the “Panama Papers.” It seemed like every news outlet had coverage about “roughly 2.6 terabytes of documents, related to hundreds of thousands of offshore companies, leaked from a small, relatively unknown Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca,” as described by TechCrunch.
The PanamaPapers.com domain name was registered in November of 2015. The domain name is registered in the name of Frederik Obermaier, who is mentioned in the TechCrunch article as one of the investigators reviewing these papers. There is a website operating on the PanamaPapers.com domain name explaining what the papers are and advertising a book. The content of the website is written in German, so non-German speakers can read the information by using Google Translate or some other translation tool.
Interestingly, although the domain name was most recently created in November of 2015, it had previously been registered to someone else years prior. The DomainTools Whois History Tool shows that a previous owner had registered PanamaPapers.com back in 2006, and it had been parked at some point on Sedo. The domain name expired several years ago.
As of this morning, “PanamaPapers” as a keyword term has been registered in several different extensions, including .org and .info. I would caution anyone who visits various PanamaPapers domain names because malicious actors can register “official” sounding domain names offering compromised downloads in the hopes of luring unsuspecting people to download files that have viruses.
The previous domain owner (2006) was most likely this indian NGO with the exact same name (Panama Papers Pvt. Ltd.) which has been formed in 2005..
See also here:
https://www.zaubacorp.com/company/PANAMA-PAPERS-PRIVATE-LIMITED/U21010GJ2005PTC045371
..and not someone having a crystal ball although it might look like that 🙂