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Goldman Sachs Trading Source Code In the Wild?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the bunny-ball-ball dept.

Hangtime writes "The world's most valuable source code could be in the wild. According to a report by Reuters, a Russian immigrant and former Goldman Sachs developer named Sergey Aleynikov was picked up at Newark Airport on July 4th by the FBI on charges of industrial espionage. According to the complaint, Sergey, prior to his early June exit from Goldman, copied, encrypted and uploaded source code inferred to be the code used by Goldman Sachs to process in real-time (micro-seconds) trades between multiple equity and commodity platforms. While trying to cover his tracks, the system backed up a series of bash commands so he was unable to erase his history, which would later give him away to Goldman and the authorities. So the question is: where are the 32MB of encrypted files that Sergey uploaded to a German server?

3 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. Non-story by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    GS's code for program trading is all written in a proprietary programming language called slang and relies on a proprietary database (secdb).

    The install for that is a hell of a lot bigger than 32 MB, so this is probably just a few trading algorithms that a pissed-off developer has copied away.

    It will be largely useless without the slang and secdb components and will be totally unsafe to trade off without a sufficient source of historic data and reference data, correctly formatted and loaded into secdb.

    The idea that this leak is likely to be in any way materially damaging to GS is frankly a joke to anyone with even a passing knowledge of how these systems really operate.

    But don't let that get in the way of your paranoia about how the world works.

  2. Re:Alternative theory....(and more probable) by Pixie_From_Hell · · Score: 5, Informative
    It's a good alternate theory, but you're a week off:

    On the week ending June 19, Goldman, for instance, was ranked first on the NYSE program trading list. But on the week of June 22, Goldman mysteriously didnâ(TM)t appear on the list of the top 15 firms at all.

    So unless the Fourth of July is celebrated in June, I think that's not the issue.

    Of course, I'm not checking the volume of trading either, so there could be something to your theory. (Of course, if GS bailed out for a week, wouldn't that lower the volume significantly? Weren't they the number one traders?)

  3. Re:Even More Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    unset HISTFILE and he (might) have been OK.

    Not likely... since most financial institutions capture not only the commands, but the output to STDOUT/STDERR, and that is logged outside, upstream of the physical machine, using tools like PowerBroker, Sudoscript, and others.

    I know, because I work for $LARGE_BANK, and we use it there. You can't just symlink ~/.bash_history to /dev/null, or unset HISTSIZE or any of that.. even the !shell trick out of vim doesn't help, because everything you type and everything it outputs, is logged where you can't wipe it out.