Seems a disgruntled employee of Goldman Sachs, the massive global investment banking company that has dealings in oil, television (they own the CSI franchise), toll roads and many, many other areas, has been arrested for releasing code and details of the software that runs the company’s online investment process.
Apparently the software works at hyper-quick speeds, allowing the company to buy rising stock and sell it on quicker than other investment firms to other investors at a small premium. The difference is milliseconds but on such timespans and billions of small transactions and amounts, trillions of dollars are made. In essence the software allows Goldman to beat everyone else to the punch. Obviously the software is coupled with the fastest of hardware to make it work.
However, any potential hacker could skew the market by utilising even quicker hardware to get in ahead of Goldman Sachs to buy stocks and then sell them on to them, usurping their place in the pecking order, reducing Goldman’s revenue per trade and skimming a monumental profit out of the market.
And the size of this potentially devastating piece of code – about 32mb…yes global financial meltdown could be transported in the form of a cheap 2 cent memory stick. It actually is a fairly large piece of source code because it is ASCII but even so – 32mb can rule the world….very scary indeed…
To add further to this blackest of black hat stories, it seems there are rumours of a cover-up by the New York Stock Exchange, fearful of any interference with the liquidity of the trading process and potential customer confidence issues.
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