SEC Discloses Hackers Penetrated EDGAR, Profited in Trading (usatoday.com)

Chris Woodyard, writing for USA Today: Hackers made their way into the Security and Exchange Commission's EDGAR electronic filing system last year, retrieving private data that appear to have resulted in "an illicit gain through trading," the agency said. It was only in August that the commission learned that hackers may have been able to use their illegal activities to make ill-gotten gains through market trading, said Chairman Jay Clayton in a lengthy statement posted on the SEC's website. EDGAR, which stands for Electronic Data Gathering Analysis and Retrieval, is considered critical to the SEC's operation and the ability of investors to see the electronic filings of companies and markets. The SEC says about 50 million documents are viewed through EDGAR on a typical day. It receives about 1.7 million filings a year.

Comments

Re:Aren't filings on edgar public?

[chill]

Not everything in EDGAR is public. Some items are submitted to EDGAR in advance of actions, and aren't released to the public until later, on a set schedule.

Those items can be used for frontrunning trades, and are essentially "insider information".