U.S. markets, public companies are growing target for Russian hackers

There have been several infamous insider trading cases on Wall Street, including Ivan Boesky in the 1980s, Martha Stewart in the early 2000s, and SAC Capital Advisors’ Mathew Martoma in the 2010s. But one of the most damaging insider trading schemes in recent years can’t be linked back to a U.S.-based trading floor or brokerage firm. Instead, it came from Russia.

As detailed in CNBC’s new original podcast series “The Crimes of Putin’s Trader,” Russian entrepreneur Vladislav Klyushin’s scam amassed more than $93 million as his cybersecurity firm M-13 was a front for Russian hackers to steal U.S. corporate earnings reports before they became public. Then, hackers traded based on those insights, buying and selling stock of well-known American companies like Tesla, Skechers, Snapchat and Roku. 

Klyushin’s actions caught the attention of the FBI and U.S. prosecutors, who ultimately were able to arrest him in Switzerland while he was headed to a skiing trip. While Klyushin was later sentenced by the Department of Justice to nine years in prison for his involvement in the hack-to-trade scheme (he was recently released in a prisoner exchange with Russia), the threat to American companies, investors, and the markets from hackers and foreign actors is growing.

“Right now, we are seeing this surge of ransomware and extortion to American companies, and that is coming out of Russia primarily, and also Eastern Europe,” Sandra Joyce, the vice president of Google Threat Intelligence at Google Cloud, told CNBC Senior Washington Correspondent Eamon Javers. “So we do feel it’s a huge concern and a national security issue for sure.”

While reporting the story, Javers received a tip that led him to a former high-ranking member of the Russian FSB intelligence agency whose job it was to steal American and Western financial and economic information.

That former spy, who now lives in the U.S. under an assumed identity, told Javers that during his career as an operative, his job was to recruit sources from the financial and banking sectors to “use them as assets for the Russian state.”

As the spy explained to Javers, the Klyushin operation was just a small part of a larger Russian strategy designed to respond unconventionally to American financial sanctions, a strategy authorized by Russian President Vladimir Putin to wreak havoc on Western economies.

“It’s a war right now happening between Russia and the West,” the spy said. “Finances and banks and [the] financial sector itself is just one of the battlefields where the whole thing is happening.”