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Goldman Sachs programmer charged with stealing code
LinkedIn profile and Unix commands history give away possible clues
By Gregg Keizer | IDG News Service | Published 11:14, 07 July 09
The FBI has charged a high-level IT developer at Goldman Sachs with theft of trade secrets and transfer of stolen property.
Sergey Aleynikov, who was also vice president, allegedly stole computer code that automates high-volume trading on stock and commodities markets, according to court documents.
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Aleynikov resigned from the investment bank on 5 June, and in the days before that he is accused of having copied, encrypted and transferred approximately 32MB of proprietary code to a server located in Germany.
He resigned to take a job with a new company "that intended to engage in high-volume automated trading", for triple his $400,000 salary, the FBI complaint said.
The FBI spelled out four data transfers from Aleynikov's workstation, both locally and remotely, on June 1, June 4 and June 5, then tied the dates and times to Aleynikov's use of his keycard to access the office, or logging in remotely from his home computer.
Aleynikov tried to cover his tracks, alleged the FBI. "The program used to encrypt the files was then erased," it said. "An attempt was also made to erase the bash history, which was unsuccessful, because of a feature of the Financial Institution's computer system that retains a back-up copy of each user's bash history."
A "bash history" is a log of the most-recently-executed commands by a user on a Unix-based operating system.
