Slashdot Mirror
Hackers Broke Into An SEC Database and Made Millions From Inside Information, Says DOJ (cnbc.com)
Federal prosecutors unveiled charges in an international stock-trading scheme that involved hacking into the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR corporate filing system. "The scheme allegedly netted $4.1 million for fraudsters from the U.S., Russia and Ukraine," reports CNBC. "Using 157 corporate earnings announcements, the group was able to execute trades on material nonpublic information. Most of those filings were 'test filings,' which corporations upload to the SEC's website." From the report: The scheme involves seven individuals and operated from May to at least October 2016. Prosecutors said the traders were part of the same group that previously hacked into newswire services. Carpenito, in a press conference Tuesday, said the thefts included thousands of valuable, private business documents. "After hacking into the EDGAR system they stole drafts of [these] reports before the information was disseminated to the general public," he said.
Those documents included quarterly earnings, mergers and acquisitions plans and other sensitive news, and the criminals were able to view it before it was released as a public filing, thus affecting the individual companies' stock prices. The alleged hackers executed trades on the reports and also sold them to other illicit traders. One inside trader made $270,000 in a single day, according to Carpenito. The hackers used malicious software sent via email to SEC employees. Then, after planting the software on the SEC computers, they sent the information they were able to gather from the EDGAR system to servers in Lithuania, where they either used it or distributed the data to other criminals, Carpenito said.
Those documents included quarterly earnings, mergers and acquisitions plans and other sensitive news, and the criminals were able to view it before it was released as a public filing, thus affecting the individual companies' stock prices. The alleged hackers executed trades on the reports and also sold them to other illicit traders. One inside trader made $270,000 in a single day, according to Carpenito. The hackers used malicious software sent via email to SEC employees. Then, after planting the software on the SEC computers, they sent the information they were able to gather from the EDGAR system to servers in Lithuania, where they either used it or distributed the data to other criminals, Carpenito said.
So this is where we get to put forth a lawsuit to establish legal president for the liability organizations have when collecting and holding onto user data who then lose that data to theft, right?
Anyone can collect any amount of info on me they want. If they lose it, it puts my wellbeing in jeopardy, so I should have the right (/responsibility) to sue them for every penny they have.
Only bankers, politicians, and politically connected billionaires are allowed to get away with this!
Plenty of corporate malfeasance and all they give a shit about are people making pennies from less information than Congress is legally allowed to insider trade with.
Will get nothing from this and continue to bear the cost of public price discovery except for the institutional traders that do not use the public exchanges.
Manipulating the futures market on the morning when the report was to be released by providing a fake report to a competitor. And in the process ruining Mortimer and Randolph Duke.
The SEC can't even safeguard and regulate what they've already got. And for some reason, everyone's waiting with baited breath for this same group of morons to provide regulations around cryptocurrency. These people are a joke, and the reason cryptocurrency was created; to bypass the power brokers who are as fallible and/or corrupt as everyone else, who through their continual ineptitude, prop the financial systems up like the precarious house of cards they are.
Short the stock on a company, then reveal you--I mean, someone--hacked them. Rinse repeat. You can even do it legally. Well, maybe wait until the lawsuit plays out first before trying that maneuver.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
It is a sickening FACT that all significant US politicians and judges are granted FULL IMMUNITY with regards to insider trading. The 'excuse' is the 'tripod'- the two houses, the president and the superior courts- each of which is supposed to be independently powerful. While the two houses (senate and house of representatives) can create new laws that would eventually change the powers of the other two 'legs'- this is ignored when it comes to the utter corruption of the US 'elites'. No matter which 'leg' the 'elite' belongs two, the other legs, for mutual benefit, agree that members of all three legs are above an extraordinary number of laws that otherwise impact ordinary Americans.
Guess why insider trading is one of these exceptions. Becoming president, a superior judge or member of the senate of house of represenatives means a LEGAL path of hyper corruption (if the person is so inclined- many are not). So the warmongering Obama and Clinton, for instance, literally make billions of dollars during their terms in office from large corporations providing them with insider information.
Yanks are so thick, they never question a system where monsters like the two Clintons enter office penniless, and leave with billions in the bank. I think Yanks are so thick, they think this system of corruption applies to other nations too- and it does not.
Oh, for sure, the corrupt rewards for leaders of political parties certainly happens elsewhere- but no other nation gives immunity for criminal business transactions for 'ordinary' members of parliament. Or for their senior judges (US senior judges cannot be prosecuted for almost any offense, for the same reason the British queen is above the law- because conceptually those judges and the queen are the law).
In general insider trading is the real way in which 'elites' build their wealth- and this form of evil only became illegal when stock markets were opened to 'ordinary' people. In the USA, insider trading literally means when the 'WRONG' types of citizen benefit from insider info. The depraved monster who ran Intel, and sold his shares BEFORE the scandal of Intel's broken (by design) CPUs hit the press (spectre and meltdown) was officially CLEARED of insider trading charges despite engaing in what most people would describe as a texbook example of this 'crime'.
Throughout Human History, I don't think there's ever been a population as thick as the American one. Americans happily swallow every lie their Deep State spews, and then boast about their subservience to their masters.
Anway, isn't it time for another story demonising Russia or Iran on slashdot?
https://youtu.be/rcLcxAwdjmo?t=5040
You know that Euronext now SELLS corporate actions filings, delaying open publication to create an arbitrage it can sell to corporate investors. Ordinary investors are deceived by stale information, here buy their ignorance from Euronext!
https://www.euronext.com/fr/market-data/products/corporate-actions
And practically every US market SELLS timely price data, delaying the real price data from open publication. Again in order to sell the fake arbitrage to professional investors.
Bloomberg, well they sell "Bloomberg terminals", and they really f*cked up. They use to publish the data opening on their website 3 days to 2 weeks late, giving their terminal users access to the best data they had, so terninal users were primarily buying the ignorance of the website viewers. Then someone in Bloomberg got greedy and removed a lot of the data from the public website. The more people they blocked from the delayed data, the less arbitrage they had to offer. People simply went elsewhere for their data.
See without patsy's to deceive, you can't sell the arbitrage from that deception.
Again these are all examples of insiders having special access to data by paying for it. All the crooks needed to do what call themselves a data broker and PAY the SEC a cut of the proceeds, and SEC would sell them an "early preview access" feed for resale.
Very similar to: https://m.slashdot.org/story/344988
Gotta admit, it's a pretty impressive scheme. Probably going to be low priority for law enforcement since the victims are mostly just faceless bank accounts, retirement funds, and related financial instruments.
You can't magically regulate people outside of your country no matter how much you want to. The reality is the internet is made up of people you can't touch and the only way to stop this shit is to not let government have it in the first place. There is always going to be someone who has it a leg up on you. Get over it. If it were even possible to make the world a fair place for all we'd all be living in extreme poverty and nobody would be happy. That's why this thing call capitalism was invented. You see when people are rewarded for there efforts (ie work) at least those who can have an opportunity to prosper and it'll generally benefit those less able [even if we exclude the destitute]. If you want to expand wealth and prosperity for near all people open up the markets, eliminate taxes and government, and implement real free trade and free travel to everybody and eliminate "intellectual" "property".
And Insider trading is not illegal to Law makers;
http://cnbc.com/id/43471561
Casteism
See title.
learn of trillion dollar bet of 90's draining southeast Asia economies leading to 9/11 coverup of SEC investigation of bet, war on Iraq distractions & wave of world economic fails we're still dealing w/ today. Who's in jail for it? Nobody! Gov allows itself insider trading.
But how many insider traders have been arrested and put in jail, never mind to the level that these hackers will?
Don't like trump's illegality pointed out? In what way is complaining about it being pointed out a rebuttal? And what happened to the "fight to the death" for the freedom of speech of the ideas you don't like?
I would imagine that hacking the SEC for this kind of info could net you more than 4.1 million. Seems like these hackers either lacked vision, or investigators didn't uncover their real game.
Dag nab them Duke boys!
The SEC is supposed to be PROTECTING us, but they are putting us in danger!
:(
People are going to wonder why they should make an effort to do anything when these guys fritter it all off to the hackers.
Bated breath, not baited breath.
From https://grammarist.com/idiom/bated-breath-vs-baited-breath/
"Bated breath is a phrase that means to hold one's breath due to suspense, trepidation or fear. Bated breath is a phrase first mentioned in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. The word bated is an abbreviation of the word abated, meaning to lessen in severity or amount."
You're welcome!