US Markets and Listed Companies Are Being Targeted by Russian Hackers

Wall Street has had a number of notorious insider trading cases, including Ivan Boesky in the 1980s, Martha Stewart in the early 2000s, and Matthew Martoma of SAC Capital Advisors in the 2010s. But one of the most damaging insider trading scams in recent years didn’t involve a U.S. exchange or brokerage firm. Instead, it took place in Russia.

As detailed in CNBC’s new original podcast series “Crimes of Putin’s Traders,” the scam of Russian entrepreneur Vladislav Klyushin, which raised more than $93 million, involved his cybersecurity firm M-13 serving as a front for Russian hackers to steal U.S. corporate earnings reports before they were released. The hackers then used those insights to buy and sell stocks in well-known U.S. companies like Tesla, Skechers, Snapchat, and Roku.

Klyushin’s actions caught the attention of the FBI and U.S. prosecutors, who eventually arrested him in Switzerland while on a ski trip. Klyushin was later sentenced to nine years in prison by the Justice Department for his role in the hacking-and-trading scheme (he was recently released in a prisoner swap with Russia), but the threat to U.S. companies, investors, and markets from hackers and foreign powers is growing.

“We’re seeing a surge of ransomware and threats against U.S. companies right now, and it’s coming primarily from Russia, but also from Eastern Europe,” Sandra Joyce, vice president of Google Threat Intelligence at Google Cloud, told CNBC’s senior Washington correspondent Eamon Javers. “So we think it’s a huge concern and certainly a national security issue.”

While reporting on the case, Harbers received a tip about a former senior official in Russia’s FSB intelligence agency who was in charge of stealing financial and economic information from the United States and the West.

The former spy, who now lives in the United States under an assumed name, told Javers that his job as an agent was to recruit informants in the financial and banking sector and “use them as assets for the Russian state.”

The spy explained to Yabus that Operation Klyushin was just part of a larger Russian strategy designed to counter U.S. financial sanctions in an unconventional way, a strategy approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin to inflict massive damage on Western economies.

“There is a war going on between Russia and the West right now,” the spy said. “Finance and banking and the sector itself is just one of the battlegrounds where everything is happening.”