Back in June 2014, CNBC reported on an extraordinary cyber attack on a large hedge fund. According to an executive at BAE Systems, hackers used a tactic called “spear phishing” to trick hedge fund employees into opening e-mails that secretly installed malware on the hedge fund’s servers. The BAE executive said that the hackers then built a lag into the hedge firm’s order-entry system that exposed the hedge fund’s proprietary strategy to the intruders, allowing them to “replicate it, trade ahead of it, trade around it, et cetera” to make significant trading profits.
