Goldman Sachs employee charged with theft of trading codes

by Gill Montia

Story link: Goldman Sachs employee charged with theft of trading codes

A former employee of Goldman Sachs has been charged with stealing trade secrets.

Sergey Aleynikov was working at the investment bank’s Wall Street head quarters when he allegedly copied computer codes that power the bank’s automatic trading systems.

In a story broken by Reuters, the 39-year-old Russian immigrant is reported to have left Goldman in June but was arrested last week, after the bank became aware of a security breach.

The case against Mr Aleynikov, who has been granted bail with surety of $750,000, hinges on accusations that he uploaded the codes to a file-sharing website.

Such codes are used to drive platforms that can perform high-speed and high-volume trades on stock and commodity markets.

Any attempt to steal them would been flagged up by a monitoring system that detects the uploading of any of the bank’s files to an external server.