U.S. charges man with stealing software from NY Fed

U.S. charges man with stealing software from NY Fed

finance.yahoo.com

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Prosecutors charged a computer programmer with stealing software code valued at nearly $10 million from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

They charged Bo Zhang, who worked as a contract programmer at the bank, with illegally copying software to an external hard drive, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. district court on Wednesday...........
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 complaint said. The GWA provides fed

(visit the link for the full news article)

Now that's interesting. Even more interesting is that the code was used in tracking Federal government expenses. I wonder what kind of mischief could be done with that program. The name of the person arrested rightfully leads to some obvious questions.

So is it Chinese Espionage or just a programmer with more mundane motives?



finance.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Wow. I wonder if this code can be compiled and ran without the government knowing. If so, this guy should have given it to a couple of people whom he trusts, who can then monitor these transactions and slip information to the media or the public. BUT, I am not sure if he got the entire source code, or enough to make it usable as an actual program. I am sure that there is great info in the code itself though at the very least.

This is extremely valuable, and is one of those things that you cannot just package in a torrent file and let everyone download. The entire system would then be rendered useless relatively quickly, once the government realized what had happened. Plus, that means more jail time for this man. This is why the other way is better imo.

But, I doubt this happened. I bet they will be interrogating him, wanting to know if he has backup copies hidden anywhere, since if they raided him they probably seized anything and everything useful at his place.

The article states, paraphrasing...

That the authorities only found out because one of the suspects colleagues was told that the suspect had lost a hard drive with the code...

Which means there I s more than one hard drive...

Which means the code is still out there...

reply to post by JiggyPotamus

I'm sure the code contains suffixes containing NSA, just like Microsoft.
en.wikipedia.org...

Sounds suspect all day along. Chinese are just men with ambitions in life and are prone to corruption just as easily as John Doe in America.

Nice program though...you can snoop in on where the money is flowing to and from.

Originally posted by maestromason
Sounds suspect all day along. Chinese are just men with ambitions in life and are prone to corruption just as easily as John Doe in America.

Nice program though...you can snoop in on where the money is flowing to and from.

The question of course should be "What is this mans particular ambition". I would not in the least be surprised if it was a chinese spy. If he was i am not sad that he got caught. If he wasn't but was trying to screw the fed,then i am.

i can confirm, the program is a stand alone and can be used without any acces auth/

reply to post by AnonyWarp



..yes
..of course

The program is more than likely 100% usless without the data that backs it. Been at this a long time myself. There is rarely a program built that keeps the data within the source code.