Modern fiction plots in the business news
Financial Times headline “The Cold War in high frequency trading turns hot” caught my eye. It sounded very James Bond and high tech, not just another routine business numbers piece.
To pace my almost obsessive need stay up to date on the daily flow of business blogs, reports, news, analysis and other data streaming through the internet - I relax by reading modern fiction. The FT story sounded like some of the plot lines I have read in my favorites works by Chuck Palahniuk,
The crime plot sounding eerily similar to these authors’ books -
Sergei Aleynikov was about to receive a $1.2 million paycheck for allegedly hacking into Goldman Sachs’ computers and stealing 32MB worth of proprietary HFT trading code (technology behind 10% of the daily world total of equity trades). The information was related to Goldman’s proprietary equities electronic trading strategies. He had been clumsy covering up his tracks and was caught by the Goldman IT people who handed the matter to the FBI.
FT described as follows:
Aleynikov claims to have created a tarball - a Unix aggregate of a number of files (like a .zip file) - on June 5 to transfer some open source stuff on the Goldman server to the XP-Dev.com server. He says he encrypted the files, then erased the encryption software, the tarball and the bash history — which is basically a back up of the Unix commands used to amalgamate and transfer the files. Goldman’s security server, however, apparently prevents or at least alerts the company to bash deletions, which appears to be how Goldman found out about the alleged theft.