Programmer steals Wall Street trading code, FBI alleges
Sources confirm Sergey Aleynikov worked at Goldman Sachs
July 6, 2009 03:01 PM ETComputerworld - A high-level developer for Goldman Sachs was arrested by the FBI Friday and charged with stealing computer code that automates the firm's high-volume trading on stock and commodities markets, according to court documents and sources close to the case.
The Reuters news service, which broke the story yesterday, tied the developer, Sergey Aleynikov, to Goldman Sachs, where he was allegedly a vice president of equity strategy.
Today, sources with knowledge of the case confirmed that Aleynikov had worked for Goldman Sachs for the last two years, and allegedly tried to steal code from the company.
In the days before his June 5 resignation from Goldman Sachs, Aleynikov copied, encrypted and transferred approximately 32MB of proprietary code to a server located in Germany, the FBI claimed in the complaint filed July 4 by Special Agent Michael McSwain, a member of the agency's securities fraud squad.
Aleynikov resigned to take a job with a new company "that intended to engage in high-volume automated trading," for triple his $400,000 salary, the complaint said.
McSwain spelled out four data transfers from Aleynikov's workstation -- both locally and remotely -- on June 1, June 4 and June 5, then tied the dates and times to Aleynikov's use of his keycard to access the office, or logging in remotely from his home computer.
Aleynikov tried to cover his tracks, alleged McSwain. "The program used to encrypt the files was then erased," the FBI agent swore in the complaint. "An attempt was also made to erase the bash history, which was unsuccessful, because of a feature of the Financial Institution's computer system that retains a back-up copy of each user's bash history."
A "bash history" is a log of the most-recently-executed commands by a user on a Unix-based operating system.
The FBI arrested Aleynikov late Friday night at the Newark Airport, and charged him with theft of trade secrets and transporting stolen property.
The complaint said that Aleynikov had made a statement after his arrest, admitting that he had copied and encrypted files from his company's servers, then transferred them to the remote server, deleted the encryption software and attempted to erase the bash history. "Aleynikov claimed, however, that he only intended to collect 'open source' files on which he had worked, but later realized that he had obtained more files than he had intended," McSwain said.
Before sources confirmed that Aleynikov worked for Goldman Sachs, Reuters had used facts in the FBI's complaint to match a LinkedIn profile for someone named "Serge Aleynikov," including his May 2007 start date and the description of his job. In the complaint, for example, McSwain said Aleynikov worked as a computer programmer on a platform that "allows the Financial Institution to engage in sophisticated, high-speed, and high-volume trades on various stocks and commodities markets."
In the LinkedIn profile, meanwhile, Aleynikov notes his position with Goldman Sachs and says he "lead development of a distributed real-time co-located high-frequency trading (HFT) platform" at the firm.
As of 2:30 p.m. ET Monday, Aleynikov was still being held in federal custody, pending bail. A Saturday hearing had set bail at $750,000, and placed both travel restrictions and computer access limitations on him assuming he posts a bond. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York declined to comment further on the case.
Goldman Sachs also declined to comment today.
Read more about cybercrime and hacking in Computerworld's Cybercrime and Hacking Knowledge Center.
Goldman Sachs
Additional Resources



White Papers & Webcasts
The Tangled Web: Silent Threats & Invisible Enemies
Download Now
Data in Action: Making the Planet Smarter
Register Now
Email Archiving: A Business-Critical Application
Get this paper now!
Gene Kim's Practical Steps to Achieve and Maintain NERC Compliance
Learn seven steps operators can take to meet IT configuration requirements set forth in the NERC-CIP standards.
The Workday User Experience Video
Watch Workday's Creative Director, Scott Lietzke, discuss the business-centered design philosophy at Workday.
Not Just Words: Enforce Your Email and Web Acceptable Usage Policies
Get this paper now!
Business Process Framework Demo
Learn about Configurable Business Processes and Calculated Fields. Watch Now!
The New World of eCrime: Targeted Brand Attacks and How to Combat Them
Download This Whitepaper Now!
Manager Experience Demo
Go beyond self-service solutions to perform more effectively. Watch Now.

