US agencies offer $2M in reward for Ukrainian hackers that breached the SEC

The US State Department and Secret Service offered $2 million in reward money for help capturing two Ukrainian SEC hackers.

The US State Department and Secret Service offered $2 million in reward money for help capturing two Ukrainian hackers that have been charged with hacking and selling insider corporate data stolen from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The offer was covered by the State Department’s Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program.

The two hackers are Viacheslavovich Radchenko and Oleksandr Vitalyevich Ieremenko, US authorities aim at receiving information that could lead to their arrest.

In the second half of 2017, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosed it was the victim of a cyber-attack in 2016. At the time, hackers were focused on non-public information stored in its EDGAR filing system.

“From on or about February 2016 through on or about March 2017, Artem Viacheslavovich Radchenko recruited Oleksandr Vitalyevich Ieremenko and other hackers in Ukraine and managed their criminal efforts to enrich themselves through a sophisticated securities fraud scheme.” reads an advisory published by the US State Department. “Ieremenko successfully hacked into the computer networks of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and extracted valuable data regarding the financial earnings of publicly traded companies.”

Radchenko and Ieremenko were charged in January 2019 for their participation in a scheme to profit from information stolen from hacked from a government database.

The duo was accused of trading on and selling early access to sensitive information from non-public annual and quarterly reports.

A federal grand jury in New Jersey filed 16 criminal charges against the two Ukrainian hackers.

“Cyber criminals do not observe nor respect the rule of law in any country. As their criminal reach is worldwide, we welcome the cooperation and coordination of all governments to bring these criminals to justice and protect innocent citizens throughout the world.” reads a press statement published by the US Department of State. “The United States is committed to that effort in part through the State Department’s Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program (TOCRP) to help our law enforcement partners bring cyber and other transnational criminals to justice.”

But Ukrainian hackers remain at large.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, SEC hackers)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.