FBI Arrests Former Trader For Stealing High Frequency Trading Code

[Razer]

Note: It's in the wild folks (or part of it), and being used for 'good'!

See: http://publicdissentiment.org/

> Public Dissentiment is an online tool that helps protesters negatively
> impact the price of a publicly traded company’s stock by communicating
> with algorithmic market makers. By using the same algorithmic
> sentiment analysis techniques as financial trading bots, the app
> generates posts for social media that link to news stories that will
> be viewed negatively by algorithmic market makers.
>
> If enough of these posts are generated in the same time frame,
> uncertainty about the targeted company’s stock will be created,
> temporarily affecting the price of the stock, consequently making the
> company’s shareholders aware of the public’s negative sentiment
> towards them.
>
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> Almost eight years after Sergey Aleynikov made HFT a watercooler topic
> after the former Goldman engineer was arrested (and incarcerated, then
> released, then charged again, then found innocent, and finally found
> guilty yet again) for allegedly stealing Goldman's proprietary HFT
> code, a trading software developer was charged last Thursday by the
> acting U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, Joon Kim, for attempting to steal
> quantitative trading code from Susquehanna International Group, a
> relatively secretive financial firm based in the Philadelphia area
> that specializes in making markets for options.
>
> A 44-year-old native Russian, Dmitry Sazonov worked for Susquehanna
> since 2004 as a software engineer and, by implication, trader. He was
> arrested in the lobby of Susquehanna’s New York offices last Wednesday
> by FBI agents, Forbes first reported.
>
> According to the complaint, Sazonov "attempted to steal valuable
> proprietary computer code that took his employer years to develop." 
> Sazonov was accused ot taking elaborate steps to conceal his attempted
> theft, including camouflaging pieces of source code within
> harmless-looking draft emails on his work computer.
>
> Specifically, the code which Sazonov was accused of stealing was
> linked to an updated trading platform Susquehanna has been developing
> for years to generate exchange and market orders. Sazonov started his
> effort to steal the proprietary trading code in February, the
> complaint says, after learning his supervisor had resigned.
>
> Prosecutors claim that Sazonov, fearing he would be fired, downloaded
> the source code to his company computer and deployed a computer
> program that may have used steganography to break up data and hide
> data within other files, including personal tax and immigration
> documents. Sazonov attached zip files containing the quant trading
> code to two saved emails addressed to a personal account, but he was
> fired and immediately escorted out of Susquehanna’s New York offices
> in February before he had a chance to send the emails.
>
> Then, according to the complaint, on multiple occasions following his
> termination Sazonov contacted individuals employed by Susqyehanna
> seeking the return of computer files on his desktop computer, which he
> claimed were personal documents.  Then, last Wednesday, April 12,
> 2017, the feds say Sazonov showed up in the lobby of Susquehanna’s New
> York offices thinking he was going to have them returned. There, an
> FBI agent pretending to be a Susquehanna employee handed Sazonov a
> disk and he was arrested.
>
> As an interesting aside in the complaint we read the following:


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-18/fbi-arrests-former-susquehanna-trader-stealing-hft-code