Feds Arrest 5 For Hacking Scheme Tied To Boeing, Caterpillar
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Two Illinois companies were targeted by a brazen insider trading ring.
Federal authorities broke up a ring that used hackers to steal corporate press announcement from Chicago-based Boeing, Peoria-based Caterpillar, and several other companies, and then profit from that information before it became public.
The hackers managed to net $30 million, according to federal prosecutors.
An indictment in the case was unsealed Tuesday morning. Shortly after that, federal agents in Georgia and Pennsylvania arrested five of the nine men accused in the scheme.
According to prosecutors, the hackers would break into company servers, steal corporate press announcements that had not yet been made public, and then passed it on to others, who used it to buy make profitable stock trades based on the inside information.
Federal prosecutor said Ukrainian hackers worked with securities traders in the U.S., who bought and sold dozens of shares of companies; including Boeing, Caterpillar, Panera Bread, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle.
The scheme dates back to 2010, and prosecutors said the hackers got their hands on more than 150,0000 press releases that were still private when they were accessed.