On Jan. 19, 2012, Business Week reported that a Chinese citizen in the U.S. since 2000 on a work visa had pilfered software code from our country’s Federal Reserve and now faces legal action in U.S. vs. Zhang.
Bo Zhang, 32, a computer programmer hired to work on the highly confidential source code last year, claimed he took the code in order to hedge his bets if he fired from the Fed job.
“He asserted that he took it for private use and in order to ensure that it was available to him in the event that he lost his job [with the New York Fed],” according to prosecutors in the case.
Espionage motivates code theft at the Federal Reserve?
In the spy world, infiltrating high levels of other governments and gaining access to key confidential data is job one. In a world in which economic upheavals are an everyday language and knowing your enemies financial structures and money movements is just as crucial. (Article continues below)
“Our cyber infrastructure is vulnerable not only to cybercriminals and hackers, but also alleged thieves like Bo Zhang,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said.
John P. Wheeler III, the former Pentagon official who was beaten, murdered and dumped in the Cherry Island landfill a little over a year ago, was very vocal about potential threats to national security due to weaknesses in America’s cyber infrastructure.
And Bo Zhang could have provided such crucial data during his four months of employment at the Reserve during 2011, from May until August. The contractor, who works for an unnamed technology company, was finally caught with his hand in the figurative code jar in August, when the FBI was notified.
According to prosecutors, Zhang had access to a software program that tracked key U.S. financial data. The code in his possession tracked,
“Billions of dollars that are electronically transferred every day in the U.S.’ General Ledger.”
In layman’s terms that means that someone working in the U.S. on a work visa had access to information America’s enemies would readily pay for. And which, by the way, was most likely compromised, as one of Zhang’s work colleagues at the Federal Reserve came forward later to tell supervisors that Zhang claimed at one point during his employment to have “lost” an external hard drive that contained the confidential code.
That, essentially, laid the ground work for the theft to appear as an accident, and for the code to make its way into someone else’s hands. At least the Federal Reserve had security procedures in place that while not able to stop the initial theft of the government’s intellectual property, did eventually conclude it had been compromised, according to a Reserve spokesman named Jack Gutt.
And in an effort to forestall a future occurrence of this nature, Gutt says
“The New York Fed has further strengthened its already considerable protections as a result of this incident.”
Profile
Bo Zhang has admitted to the FBI that he took the code and that it was wrong, according to Business Week. The computer programmer insists that it was for his own personal use and claimed it was "in case he was fired."
This speaks to the fact that Bo Zhang suspected his job was at risk before he ever took the code, or that he knew it would be as soon as anyone suspected he had illegally obtained the software data on America's Federal Reserve system.
Anyone at the level of employment as Zhang would have known that contract employees and full-time regular employees aren't allowed to hold their employers hostage with company property "in case they are fired," especially individuals working in a foreign country on a work visa.
Zhang would have readily understood the seriousness of his actions of taking Federal Reserve code. And the fact that he is trying to insist this was an effort to benefit his own personal training company is almost laughable.
Theft is theft, regardless of the alleged motivation behind it, however. And theft of such highly confidential information of a government nature by a foreign citizen can't be construed as the result of an angry employee afraid of getting his walking papers.
Comments