Estonian trader hack nets 7.8 million

November 3, 2005 9:12 PM

Oh, the tangled webs we weave when we practice to deceive... Two traders with Estonias most prestigious financial firm spider the Business Wire website and manage to read headlines of impending news stories effectively enabling them to time the market to the tune of 7.8 million in profit...
posted by Muirwylde (9 comments total)

Is that illegal or clevarr?!

(Or both?)
posted by uncanny hengeman at 9:15 PM on November 3, 2005

Has to do with whether or not the spider guessed at a non-public directory or file. Most commercial and open source spiders do this. It's a shame they'll probably be legally responsible for an educated guess. Security through obscurity and all that.

If they were simply able to follow links to their ends, they should get off free
posted by WetherMan at 9:20 PM on November 3, 2005

A "fraudulent hacking scheme"? Hackers R teh scarey!

Seriously, it just seems that BW wasn't doing a terribly good job at keeping those "embargoed" stories under wraps, so of course the SEC goes after the foreigners -- just like the state trooper who only pulls over people with out-of-state plates.
posted by clevershark at 9:24 PM on November 3, 2005

If their scheme involved only information that they were paying for through a service, just carefully aggegated, seems ok to me.
posted by starscream at 9:38 PM on November 3, 2005

*aggregated, duh!
posted by starscream at 9:39 PM on November 3, 2005

A turtles take, just happend to be reading that cartoon directly before reading this.
posted by lloyder at 4:29 AM on November 4, 2005

This is good. Newman and Redford could star in the movie. Maybe some nice ragtime music too.
posted by Sk4n at 6:20 AM on November 4, 2005

lloyder: nice catch.
posted by Popular Ethics at 2:46 PM on November 4, 2005

The article linked to confuses the issue, since for the SEC, they don't have to prove 'hacking' under any statute, only that the traders made trades using information they knew wasn't publicly available. I doubt they could even bring a case under any of the security-act laws; seems likely they'd have to hand it off to the FBI or SS. From my limited memory of our legal-vs-illegal trading lessons at Intel, the crime for the SEC is all in the insider-information used, not how it was aquired.
posted by nomisxid at 4:22 PM on November 4, 2005