Thursday, January 19, 2012

Security Breach–New York Fed–Employee Accused of Stealing And Admitted to Copying $10 Million Dollars Worth of Algorithms (Software)

Is there money in those algos?  This story might answer that.  Why would this employee who was a contracted programmer take this code?  It’s worth money and if you read often enough you know I discuss those algos and software is nothing more than a group of algorithms, words of Bill Gates.  image

A co-worker said the employee said the accused confused he lost the drive containing the code and get this, it’s the software (aka algorithms) that cost $10 million to develop to track the billions of dollars  that the US government dispenses “daily” to government agencies..these are some pretty commanding algorithms…so the programmer apparently took the code and who knows where it would go next?  A lot of government code is open source but don’t think that is the case here…what’s the next security breach to occur?  BD 

Bo Zhang, 32, of Queens, New York, worked as a contract programmer at the bank. He was accused of illegally copying software to an external hard drive, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. district court in Manhattan.

Authorities said the software, owned by the U.S. Treasury Department, cost about $9.5 million to develop.

A New York Fed spokesman said in a statement that the bank immediately investigated the suspected breach when it was uncovered and promptly referred the matter to authorities.

Zhang told investigators he took the code "for private use and in order to ensure that it was available to him in the event that he lost his job," the complaint said.

The code, called the Government-wide Accounting and Reporting Program (GWA), was developed to help track the billions of dollars the United States government transfers daily. The GWA provides federal agencies with a statement of their account balance, the complaint said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/19/us-nyfed-theft-idUSTRE80H27L20120119?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+reuters/technologyNews+%28News+/+US+/+Technology%29

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