Bernie Madoff - "It was inconceivable that he was a crook"

Bernie Madoff died on 14 April 2021 aged 82. He was in the 12th year of his 150 year prison sentence after committing the biggest Ponzi fraud in US financial history.

In this interview "Bernie Madoff: 'The Wizard of Lies' ", first published in September 2017, Diana Henriques drew on her years of financial journalism and extraordinary access to the title character to write the definitive book about Bernie Madoff. It was turned into an HBO movie in early 2017 starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Diana, playing herself. 

This is compelling listening. Hear it rebroadcast on the "Bribe, Swindle or Steal" podcast  HERE.

 

Nasdaq Hack Attribution Questioned

From Bank Info Security

“Two zero-day vulnerabilities were exploited by the attackers who hacked NASDAQ's systems in October 2010. A senior U.S. legislator claims the hackers had "nation-state" backing. That claim aside, however, security experts say it's still not clear who hacked NASDAQ or why, although there's still no indication that attackers accessed or altered the systems running the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports (also see our previous post) that two different zero-day vulnerabilities - previously unknown code bugs - were used to compromise NASDAQ. The in-depth report on the breach is based on interviews with more than two dozen people who have knowledge of the attack details or related digital forensic investigation. Despite their collective input, however, the only thing that remains clear about the motive or identity of the attackers is how unclear they still remain. Indeed, even the duration of the hack remains unknown, with investigators saying it began by October 2010, but may have started earlier. Likewise, it's not clear exactly what the attackers accessed or stole.”

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How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq

From Bloomberg Businessweek

“In October 2010, a Federal Bureau of Investigation system monitoring U.S. Internet traffic picked up an alert. The signal was coming from Nasdaq. It looked like malware had snuck into the company’s central servers. There were indications that the intruder was not a kid somewhere, but the intelligence agency of another country. More troubling still: When the U.S. experts got a better look at the malware, they realized it was attack code, designed to cause damage.

As much as hacking has become a daily irritant, much more of it crosses watch-center monitors out of sight from the public. The Chinese, the French, the Israelis—and many less well known or understood players—all hack in one way or another. They steal missile plans, chemical formulas, power-plant pipeline schematics, and economic data. That’s espionage; attack code is a military strike. There are only a few recorded deployments, the most famous being the Stuxnet worm. Widely believed to be a joint project of the U.S. and Israel, Stuxnet temporarily disabled Iran’s uranium-processing facility at Natanz in 2010. It switched off safety mechanisms, causing the centrifuges at the heart of a refinery to spin out of control. Two years later, Iran destroyed two-thirds of Saudi Aramco’s computer network with a relatively unsophisticated but fast-spreading “wiper” virus. One veteran U.S. official says that when it came to a digital weapon planted in a critical system inside the U.S., he’s seen it only once—in Nasdaq.”

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Exchanges Can Ruin High-Frequency Trading Benefits: Study

From Bloomberg

“Exchanges risk making it harder for investors to get the best price by facilitating ever-faster trading, according to academics who examined Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. venues.

When Nasdaq sped up its markets in Copenhagen, Helsinki and Stockholm in 2010 by introducing its INET software platform, it spurred a race for profits among high-frequency traders, according to the report from VU University Amsterdam’s Albert Menkveld and his student, Marius Zoican. That competition reduced earnings. To compensate, the traders widened the spread between prices they were willing to pay to buy and sell shares, making it more expensive for most investors to trade stocks.

High-frequency traders using computers to automatically buy and sell have become the dominant market makers on exchanges around the world, supplanting human traders. Menkveld and Zoican’s paper says that when exchanges get faster, such as when Nasdaq reduced the reaction time of its Nordic markets to 250 microseconds from 2,500 microseconds in early 2010, they encourage not just helpful, liquidity providing high-speed traders, but also speculative ‘bandits’.”

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