Keeping Passwords Private
October 30, 2009Here’s a very interesting story on insider trading:
It was also big enough to alert authorities to Grmovsek’s and Cornblum’s audacious 46-deal, 14-year insider trading scheme — Canada’s largest ever. Over that span, they netted more than $9 million, according to Canada’s securities regulator.
The scheme came to light less than two weeks after the biggest hedge fund insider trading case in history, involving the Galleon Group as well as executives at several blue chip U.S. firms.
One of the ways the duo got advanced notice of M&As was by getting access to computers by using passwords handed out to the word processing department.
The sharing of passwords seems to be playing a big role when it comes to big-time fraud. Société Générale, for example.
You want to keep those private. I don’t know that I agree that they should be changed every 6-months and made as long and as incomprehensible as possible (it works in theory, never in practice), but they really shouldn’t be shared. At all.
