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from the investing-is-easier-when-you-know-the-future dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408
At a Kiev nightclub in the spring of 2012, 24-year-old Ivan Turchynov made a fateful drunken boast to some fellow hackers. For years, Turchynov said, he'd been hacking unpublished press releases from business newswires and selling them, via Moscow-based middlemen, to stock traders for a cut of the sizable profits.
[...] Newswires like Business Wire are clearinghouses for corporate information, holding press releases, regulatory announcements, and other market-moving information under strict embargo before sending it out to the world. Over a period of at least five years, three US newswires were hacked using a variety of methods from SQL injections and phishing emails to data-stealing malware and illicitly acquired login credentials. Traders who were active on US stock exchanges drew up shopping lists of company press releases and told the hackers when to expect them to hit the newswires. The hackers would then upload the stolen press releases to foreign servers for the traders to access in exchange for 40 percent of their profits, paid to various offshore bank accounts. Through interviews with sources involved with both the scheme and the investigation, chat logs, and court documents, The Verge has traced the evolution of what law enforcement would later call one of the largest securities fraud cases in US history.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday August 27 2018, @06:15PM (2 children)
But it was not stealing.
In this narrow case I think you could argue it was stealing.
Consider:
The press release contains a secret.
Hackers tell everyone about the secret.
The business actually has been deprived of that secret because it's not a secret anymore.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 27 2018, @07:41PM
But if the lost thing was the secrecy, then it is not stealing, as when it stopped being a secret, it also wasn't a secret for the hackers. Therefore they didn't steal the secrecy, they destroyed it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Tuesday August 28 2018, @01:03AM
They stole money from the other traders by having the insider information. If it were gambling they peaked at the cards before betting, which steals from everyone at the table. (but I take the semantics point)