Goldman Sachs Employee Allegedly Used Xbox For Insider Trading

Leonardo DiCaprio stands behind an Xbox 360.

Image: Paramount Pictures / Microsoft / Kotaku

A newly unsealed FBI indictment accuses a former analyst at Goldman Sachs of insider trading, including allegedly using an Xbox to pass tips onto his close friends. The friend group earned over $400,000 in ill-gotten gains as a result, federal prosecutors claim. “There’s no tracing [Xbox 360 chat],” the analyst allegedly told his friend who was worried they might be discovered. He appears to have made a grave miscalculation.

The FBI arrested Anthony Viggiano and alleged co-conspirator Christopher Salamone, charging them with securities fraud on September 28. Viggiano is accused of using his previous position at Goldman Sachs to share trading tips with Salamone and others. Salamone has already pleaded guilty. Bloomberg reports that this is the fifth incident in recent years of a person associated with the investment bank allegedly using their position to do crimes.

Viggiano and Salamone were childhood friends, the FBI claims, and beginning last last Salamone allegedly purchased shares and call options for obscure companies including Maxar Technologies, Atlas Technical Consultant, and Syneous Health, after receiving tips from Viggiano. It sounds like at least some of this insider info was shared on Microsoft’s high tech, ultra-secure gaming platform.

“Signal, or like Xbox 360 chat, there’s no tracing that, good luck ever finding that,” Viggiano allegedly told Salamone in a recording made by the latter after both were first interviewed by the FBI in June. The two were discussing who in their inner circle might flip, with Viggiano trying to assure Salamone that potential incriminating evidence was out of the FBI’s reach. “So, I mean, at worst—we’re talking worst-case scenario, maybe I said something in…like the very first [message to Steve]. But that’s the worst case.”

It’s not clear if both friends actually still played games on the Xbox 360 in the year 2022, or if Viggiano was mis-remembering the name of the Xbox One or Xbox Series X/S. Maybe they did use the original 2005 console to communicate, thinking it was somehow more private as a result of its archaic interface and outdated systems. We also don’t know if the FBI ever actually got ahold of the Xbox chats in question, or merely got Salamone to confess by making it seem like they did.

Probably best to keep the crime talk on Xbox to a minimum either way, especially now that Microsoft is using AI to monitor communications for illicit and toxic activities.

       

Sony Suffers Two Hacks In Four Months, Employee Info Exposed

A week after an extortion group called Ransomed.vc claimed to have hacked into Sony’s systems and stolen 3.14GB of data, the company has admitted to a second security breach. This one occurred back in May and involved the personal data of nearly 6,791 current and former employees.

The older but previously unknown hack was reported yesterday by Bleeping Computer. A notice from Sony to employees said the hack occurred by way of an exploit in “Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer platform.” The security breach occurred on May 28 before the exploit was fixed, leading the personal information of thousands of current and former employees at Sony Interactive Entertainment to be compromised.

The company is offering “complimentary Equifax complete Premier credit monitoring and identity restoration services” to those impacted. Equifax had to pay $575 million as part of a 2019 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over its own data breach exposing the personal information of 147 million consumers.

Meanwhile, the more recent hack, first publicized last week by a group called Ransomed.vc, appears to have been real. While Sony said it was investigating the claims at the time, it has now told Bleeping Computer that a third-party forensics specialists helped it identify rogue activity on a “single server located in Japan used for internal testing for the Entertainment, Technology and Services (ET&S) business.” That’s a separate part of the company from Sony’s gaming, music, and movie divisions.

“Sony has taken this server offline while the investigation is ongoing,” the company said in its new statement. “There is currently no indication that customer or business partner data was stored on the affected server or that any other Sony systems were affected. There has been no adverse impact on Sony’s operations.”

No information appears to have leaked from the most recent breach, although there has been some dispute over who exactly was responsible for it. While Ransomed.vc originally claimed responsibility and threatened to release the data unless Sony paid it $2.5 million, another user called “MajorNelson,” seemingly named after the now-retired Xbox hype-man, said the group was not involved. They then went ahead and leaked a 2.4 GB compressed archive that allegedly included actual Sony data, though no one has yet verified if that’s actually the case.

So far at least, neither hack appears to be anywhere near the scale of major security breaches at Sony in the past, including North Korea’s hack of its movie division and that time when PlayStation Network went down for over a month.

Correction 10/5/2023 3:41 p.m. ET: Bleeping Computer’s report was published on October 4, not October 5.