BAE Systems PLC (ADR) (OTCMKTS:BAESY) has revealed that it has foiled a cyber-attack on a large hedge fund, CNBC’s Eamon Javers said in a recent report.
According to Javers, BAE Systems PLC (ADR) (OTCMKTS:BAESY) does not exactly know who committed the cyber-attack. What it means, however, is that the group had specialized knowledge on how to do this attack. The CNBC personality also said that this also implies that there are only a few people or groups of people in the world who could have carried out this attack. The attackers would have had the technical knowledge and the ability to carry out intricate financial engineering to presumably profit from the trades that the hedge fund was making.
In their interview, BAE Systems PLC’s (ADR) (OTCMKTS:BAESY) Paul Henninger said that the attack was not designed to destroy the hedge fund’s system or to steal intellectual property. It was designed to get data in order for someone to profit from the hedge fund’s trades. He noted that this type of cyber-attack is fairly recent. He explained:
“There’s not hundreds or thousands of these people out there. That said, one thing we absolutely do know is that this appears to have been a for-profit attack. That’s one of the things that has changed fairly significantly over the last 18 months or so in terms of the profile of digital crimes just like this at this level of sophistication that’s perpetrated against hedge funds and other capital market firms. This was not an attack that was designed to sabotage their systems. This was not an attack designed to steal intellectual property. This was an attack that appears to be designed for someone to make money.
According to Eamon Javers, BAE Systems PLC (ADR) (OTCMKTS:BAESY) has seen other recent cyber-attacks where the perpetrators rummaged around the systems of hedge funds to try to uncover how the hedge funds trade. However, Henninger said that this type of attack would be fairly rare because though it is very lucrative, attackers carrying out this type of attack need to stay off the radar. The BAE Systems PLC (ADR) (OTCMKTS:BAESY) analyst explained:
“This type of attack is extremely rare and on some level, there is an incentive for the criminal to keep it extremely rare. You can make a tremendous amount of money off of one of these types of attacks every few months and there’s a strange incentive system on the part of digital criminals that conduct this type of stuff. On the one hand, they’re in the business to make money so they want to conduct as many of these as they can. On the one hand, they don’t want it too far above the radar because as soon as this starts to become above the radar, people will start to put in place the defenses that they need to put in place to defend against it.”
Watch the report below.
Disclosure: None
