Feds: Group made USD 30M with hacked press release information

A group of Ukrainian hackers worked with securities traders in the US to make USD 30 million by breaking into the computer systems of companies that publish news releases about publicly traded companies and trading on the information before it was made public, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors in New Jersey and New York City, along with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Jo White, will discuss the case during a news conference Tuesday in Newark, New Jersey.
An indictment against five people was unsealed in Newark, and another was filed under seal in New York City's Brooklyn borough. The group includes two people described as Ukrainian computer hackers and two securities traders from Alpharetta, Georgia.

They are charged with 23 counts, including securities fraud, wire fraud, fraud in connection with computers, aggravated identity theft and money laundering conspiracy.
Prosecutors allege the scheme started in February 2010, and the defendants gained access to 150,000 news releases from services including Toronto, Canada-based Marketwired, New York-based PR Newswire and San Francisco-based Business Wire.
According to the indictment, the conspirators hacked into the news services' computer networks to gain access to unpublished news releases that contained nonpublic information about companies. The traders, identified in the indictment as Arkady Dubovoy, Pavel Dubovoy and Igor Dubovoy, would use the information to execute trades just before the information was made public, usually shortly after the close of markets.