The Securities & Exchange Commission has disclosed that hackers penetrated its electronic system for storing public-company filings last year and may have traded on the information.
The SEC said it was investigating the source of the hack, which exploited a software vulnerability in a part of the agency’s Edgar system, a comprehensive database of filings made by thousands of public companies and other financial firms regulated by the SEC.
The commission said the hack was detected in 2016, but that regulators didn’t learn about the possibility of related illicit trading until August, when they started an investigation and began cooperating with what the SEC called “appropriate authorities.”
It is time for a government commission to determine whether the large amounts of data collected by government agencies can be properly secured and significant limits be placed on such government data gathering.
-RW
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