As I reported to you this past August, five Americans and four Ukrainians were indicted in the largest hacking and securities fraud enterprise in American history.  The nine defendants are made up of rogue stock traders including hedge fund manager and former Morgan Stanley employee Vitaly Korchevsky along with four computer hackers based in the Ukraine.  The hackers used simple phishing tactics to gain access to more than 150,000 press releases issued by Marketwired, PR Newswire in New York and Business Wire of San Francisco on behalf of numerous American companies including Panera, Caterpillar, Inc and Align Technology that contained earnings and other corporate information prior to their public release.  This enabled the stock traders to make trades based on this inside information before it became known to the public.  It is estimated that between 2010 and 2015, the defendants made profits of 100 million dollars on 800 trades during this time.  A few days ago Alexander Garkusha pleaded guilty to making trades based upon the stolen information that personally gained him $125,000. Garkusha is cooperating with the government at this time.  His sentencing is scheduled for May 6th.

TIPS

One of the biggest takeaways from this case is how easy it is to still use phishing emails to lure people into clicking on links tainted with malware that permits hackers to steal a person’s or company’s data.  Apparently corporations still have not learned to train their employees to recognize phishing emails nor have they learned to encrypt and segregate sensitive data from hackers.  This lesson is one that each of us as individuals should also learn in our own lives because identity thieves and hackers use the same phishing technique to steal the identities of individual victims.  Never click on links in emails regardless of from whom they appear to come unless you are absolutely sure that the link is legitimate.  It well could contain keystroke logging malware that will steal all of the information from your computer.  Also, it is important to remember that you cannot rely on your anti-malware software to protect you because the best anti-malware software is always at least a month behind the latest malware.