14 DAY TRIAL // Bank of America (BoA), the largest bank in the United States, has established a team of officials to assess the possible fallout if WikiLeaks releases tens of thousands of its internal documents.
At the end of November, in an interview for Forbes, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange revealed that the organization's next "megaleak" will involve a large US bank.
He said the cache of documents will reveal an "ecosystem of corruption," where bank executives follow their own interests and turn a blind eye to unethical practices.
Even though the targeted financial institution was not named, people immediately assumed that it's Bank of America.
This is because one year earlier, Assange announced that WikiLeaks is in possesion of hard disk drive belonging to a Bank of America executive.
An indication that people believe the alleged 5GB of confidential data belong to Bank of America is the fact that the bank's shares fell by 3 percent a day after the Forbes interview was published.
According to a new New York Times report, that same day, BoA put its chief risk officer, Bruce R. Thompson in charge of a team tasked with conducting an internal investigation into a possible leak.
Thompson is said to have selected between 15 and 20 top staffers from the finance, technology, legal and communications departments and had them scour through internal documents for things that could prove damaging to the organization's reputation if they got out.
The hope is for the investigation to result in the creation of a contingency plan that covers different scenarios and situations that might arise from such a leak.
Assange said the revelations in the documents are bad enough to force the resignation of some executives and possibly attract official investigations.
NYT also claims that Bank of America sought consultancy services from Booz Allen Hamilton and paid top law firms for advice on possible liability issues.
Sources close to the investigation revealed that so far the bank's team did not identify any missing hard disk that could be in WikiLeaks' possession.
One thing's clear, if Bank of America is the targeted organization - and rumor has it the world will learn pretty soon - it wants to be prepared.