Federal authorities announced today that they had broken up a five-year scheme in which rogue traders gave overseas hackers a “shopping list” of confidential corporate news releases to steal, generating more than $30 million in illegal profits, the New York Times reported today. The authorities are preparing to announce the filing of criminal charges against nine people who used confidential information about corporate deals that was stolen by hackers to make trades. The unusual case, which links hacking with insider trading, is being brought by federal authorities in New Jersey and in Brooklyn. The Securities and Exchange Commission is bringing a parallel lawsuit. The investigation has been in the works for a while and federal agents began making arrests today. Federal prosecutors in New Jersey today unsealed an indictment against five men that laid out the basics of the case. It said that the men had been hacking into companies like Business Wire and PR Newswire over five years to steal more than 150,000 news releases put out by publicly traded corporations before the information had been released to the public. The men, some of them hackers in Eastern European countries and others located in the United States who traded on the information, made at least tens of millions of dollars trading with the information. Another company that had its releases stolen was MarketWire, according to the indictment.
