An unnamed hedge fund was attacked by cybercriminals in 2013, causing them to lose millions of dollars and disrupting the firm’s high-speed trading, CNBC reports.
Tech company BAE Systems reported the hack, saying “It’s pretty amazing, the level of business sophistication involved as opposed to technical sophistication involved was something we had not seen before.” The cybercriminals used a technique called “spearphishing”, where an email is sent containing links to malware.
“In the new case, attackers went after the hedge fund’s trade order entry system, seeking to disrupt the fund’s trading strategy and to send details of the trades themselves outside the firm. CNBC said, “The new wave of attacks includes other assaults on hedge funds seemingly designed to uncover their trading strategies, and implies the existence of cybercriminals with the technical savvy to attack highly secure computer networks and, at the same time, the financial and market savvy to replicate intricate high-speed trading strategies.”
Bloomberg reports that there have been many more attacks on hedge funds: “More than a half-dozen computer security experts, who in recent interviews characterized the hedge-fund industry as the target of multiple attacks, many successful. Over the past two years, computer networks at dozens of banks, hedge funds, law firms and other Wall Street companies have been infiltrated by hackers mainly from Eastern European countries.” None of the hedge funds were named by the cybersecurity firms.