May 17, 2016
Vadym Iermolovych, 28, of Kiev, Ukraine, pleaded guilty yesterday for his role in the hacking of business newswire services Marketwired, PR Newswire and Business Wire, from where he stole sensitive financial information and sold it to other parties that made fraudulent stock transactions.
Iermolovych and conspirators breached the three aforementioned services between February 2010 and August 2015, from where they stole non-public press releases that contained sensitive information such as earnings, gross margins, revenues, and other confidential information.
They then created a website on which they sold this information to interested third parties. These individuals, in turn, used the stolen non-public press releases to make ahead-of-time transactions on Wall Street and other stock exchanges.
Prosecutors said this website had “shopping list” and “wish list” functionality to allow the buyers to select or order the press releases they desired.