The Code

We always have this notion this thought that all the stories related to Wall Street are about who makes how much, the ongoing financial saga and the everlasting insiders trading. We always consider Wall Street to be very personal and conservative about what goes on inside its 4 walls. How about something new and refreshing? How about knowing something which is not exactly but somewhat resembles to the Mission Impossible series or to one of those sequences of 24?

The Fact:
I’ve been following this story over the web for quite some time and every time I read something about it I feel as if I am reading the script from one of the high adrenaline thrillers or one of the cyber crime movies from the Hollywood. There is this person (highly skilled computer programmer) smart enough to steal this very important software code from one of the World’s biggest financial organizations and then try to run away with it. The organization turns out to be smart enough (smarter than the person who steals it) to trace the digital footprint of this hacker and reports this incident of the code theft to the police. This hacker is on the run. In this act of cat & mouse chase, the hacker was smart enough to hide the copy of this code on one of the backup server’s overseas. The Police officials ultimately get hold of this person and now he is waiting for the trial. We actually don’t know what will happen after the trial as it is scheduled to be held sometime next year.

Prologue:
In July 2009, the first news started was out that there has been a security breach at one of the finest Wall Street organizations. That one of the high frequency trading (HFT) code has been compromised. The HFT software code is nothing but a combination of complex algorithms which is used to incorporate high frequency trading. The code is very sophisticated and is capable of doing millions of transactions with a blink of an eye. Codes like these has been always dealt with skepticism by the common man as these codes are known to be lighting fast for complicated transaction and can be notorious as well to bring down the whole system (for more information see Flash Crash that happened in May 2010). Someone who is in possession of this code and know how to use it can change the face of the market before anybody knows. The breach was nothing but an act of theft which was done successfully by one of the chief programmers of this organization. This fine act came just 3 days before the programmer was about to leave this organization for another lucrative offer.

Each & every word after this is purely an assumption. May be this is the result of me watching too many movies and my mind started to think like that.

Epilogue:
March 2011, after the final trial all the evidences points against that the hacker and he is guilty as charged. As a result he hands over the code to the cops and they hands it down to the financial organization. Hacker goes to prison. The code is safe again and no damage done. In this scenario everybody is happy: the financial firm, the cops and the common people like me who read such stories and try to analyze. As normally as it happened in the movies, good guys won bad guys lost and you & me gets our well deserved entertainment. Problem resolved & case closed. Problem resolved? I don’t think so. We all just forget about that copy of the code which is still out there on one of the backup server’s overseas. I have doing some interesting analysis of what might happen to that code which is still out in the open. I am sure there are number of other things which one can decide but this is what I come up with:

Scenario 1: Someone might get his hand on the code. Finds it useless and deletes it.

Scenario 2: This someone turned out be another hacker who fine tunes the code, fix the bugs if any, makes it more powerful and sell it to the another financial organization and make millions.

Scenario 3 (my favorite): The hacker (who is unaware about the owner of the code) invested these millions dollars (which he earned in scenario2) in the same bank who owns the code. The bank crashes and he lost everything.

Scenario 4: In these times of open source, one of the open source evangelist gets this code and made the code public.

Scenario 5: The code is in the hands of Wikileaks and they try to expose it.

Scenario 6: The bank anonymously helped the hacker (who steals the code) by bailing him out. Give him couple of million dollars for pulling off this show of stealing the fake code and distracting people from the wrong doings of the bank.

Conclusion:
We live in this World which is now very well connected, thanks to the internet revolution. We cannot imagine how someone can use unrecognized holes in the web to their advantage. How vulnerable is the information out there in open and how someone can twist and turn that information to cause untenable damage. Moreover this is just a heads up for the information security that anything can happen and more stringent processes needs to be in place to put an end to this.

Puzzle:
I usually give out the names of the concerning parties in my blog. This time I won’t give out any information upfront. There is this very small puzzle which you all need to resolve to find out the reality behind this. The name of the bank who owns the code consists of 2 words and one of these words rhymes with 33.33% of the letters in the word saxophone. I hope you get the name of the bank. Once you get the name of the bank and willing to read the articles on the subject & to know the name of the programmer who compromised the code plus more interesting details, you need to choose smart key words from the blog above and try to make use of this site - 1 followed by 100 zeroes (this should not be tough, thanks to the internet age).