trade secret hack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

This month has been full of breaches. Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the top U.S. markets regulator, has disclosed that hackers managed to hack into its financial document filing system and may have illegally profited from the stolen information. On Wednesday, the SEC announced that its officials learnt last month that a previously detected 2016 cyber attack, which exploited a "software vulnerability" in the online EDGAR public-company filing system, may have "provided the basis for illicit gain through trading." EDGAR , short for Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval, is an online filing system where companies submit their financial filings, which processes around 1.7 million electronic filings a year. The database lists millions of filings on corporate disclosures—ranging from quarterly earnings to sensitive and confidential information on mergers and acquisitions, which could be used for insider-trading or manipulating

Hackers won't be spared. Three Chinese hackers have been ordered to pay $8.8 million (£6.8 million) after hacking email servers of two major New York-based law firms to steal corporate merger plans in December 2016 and used them to trade stocks. The U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan sued 26-year-old Iat Hong, 30-year-old Bo Zheng, and 50-year-old Hung Chin, over a multi-million dollar insider trading scam. According to BBC News , the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged the three hackers targeted 7 different law firms, but managed to installed malware on networks belonging to two law firms only, then compromised their IT admin accounts that gave the trio access to every email account at the firms. Access to the email and web servers allowed them to gain information on planned business mergers and/or acquisitions. The trio then used this information to buy company stock before the deal, and then sell it after the public announcement of the merger

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo