Chicago Mercantile Exchange Secrets Leaked To China

chicksdaddy writes with this excerpt from Threat Post: "A 10 year employee of CME Group in Chicago is alleged to have stolen trade secrets and proprietary source code used to run trading systems for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and passed them to officials in China, where he hoped to set up a software firm to help create electronic exchanges, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Illinois. Chunlai Yang, 49, is alleged to have downloaded "thousands of files" containing "source code and proprietary algorithms" used by CME to run its trading systems. The files were downloaded from a company-owned source code repository maintained by CME to Yang's work computer, then copied them to removable "thumb" drives. The complaint also cites personal e-mail correspondence between Yang and an official in China that contained proprietary CME information."

Comments

Shades of an Earlier Era

[MarkvW]

The United States was mighty competitive with Great Britain around the turn of the last century.

Same game, different faces.

Re:BTW, The Suspect is a US Citizen

[h4rr4r]

Lame troll is lame.

Natural born citizens sell out to foreign countries all the time. Greed is not based on nationality or place of birth.

Re:Thousand Grains of Sand

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese learned the lessons of history well. Stealing industrial secrets from China was a favourite of Europeans:

"Similar to other European travellers of the period, such as Walter Medhurst, Fortune disguised himself as a Chinese merchant during several, but not all, of his journeys beyond the newly established treaty port areas. Not only was Fortune's purchase of tea plants forbidden by the Chinese government of the time, but his travels were also beyond the allowable day's journey from the European treaty ports."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fortune

We'll see if the Chinese stoop as low as the Europeans and Americans did during the Opium War, where they forced the Chinese to buy drugs from them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

You know why America is screwed?

[MikeRT]

Because the average American cannot believe their lying eyes that China is now starting to go around the world much like the British Empire in advancing its own interests, building its power, subverting local governments and even yes colonizing (how many Americans know that China is exporting surplus population to Africa to help it acquire resources). Stupid Americans make comments about how we can't rush to judgment that Chinese might be more dangerous than other ethnic groups to hire for sensitive positions, despite the fact that it's public knowledge that their government aggressively engages in and encourages industrial espionage. They have a crowdsourcing program for intelligence (of all types) gathering, for fuck's sake.

But oh no, it's just those evil right-wing extremists and union workers who think China is a serious threat to our people and way of life. Everyone knows they're just a large asian version of Mexico.

Re:Thousand Grains of Sand

[jpapon]

Oh, please. I have no love for the Chinese government, but even I know that this is in no way unique to them.

For as long as there has been property, there have been thieves. The U.S. stole much of its industrial-revolution era technology from the U.K. Europe stole many of the ideas that brought about the renaissance from the Arabs. The Arabs stole much of this engineering knowledge from the Byzantine Romans. They in turn stole from anyone they could lay their blood covered hands on. That's how it works. How can people on Slashdot bitch about software patents, and then complain about Chinese theft of software?

They're ideas, goddamnit. They spread. That's why they're beautiful.