(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Authorities have arrested a former employee of financial firm Goldman Sachs (www2.goldmansachs.com) and let go of on bail over accusations that he downloaded proprietary software and sent the data to a German-based Web server.
The FBI arrested 39-year-old Sergey Aleynikov at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday as he got off a flight and charged with trade-secret theft.
Aleynikov worked as a software programmer at Goldman Sachs for just over two years, starting from May 2007.
According to an FBI affadavit, Aleynikov dowloaded the codes after receiving a job offer from a company that engaged in high-volume automated trading just days before his June 5th departure from Goldman Sachs.
At the time, Aleynikov was earning $400,000 a year.
Authorities say that Aleynikov stole codes used for complex automated stock and commodities trading.
Suspicion began to arise in the past few weeks when officials at Goldman Sachs began to notice large amounts of data uploads from their computer system via HTTPS.
The company soon discovered that Aleynikov’s work desktop had been used at least four times to upload about 32MB of data through HTTPS to an outside website.
Upon learning this, the company began an internal investigation of the data transfers.
The investigation had its first breakthrough on June 5 when the company reportedly found a record of a series of commands entered in Aleynikov’s desktop, which included compressed and merged files that contained the platform’s code and some of its associated programs.
The record shows that after the script was run, the copied files were encrypted, renamed and uploaded to the website.
Though Aleynikov admitted to copying, encrypting and uploading the data, and eventually copying the data to his home computer, laptop and a portable memory device, he denied any allegations that he distributed any proprietary software.
He says he intended on gathering only the open-source files he had personally worked on, only to later realize that he had taken other data as well.
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