Federal prosecutors have charged a man for an alleged “hack-to-trade” scheme that earned him millions of dollars by breaking into the Office365 accounts of executives at publicly traded companies and obtaining quarterly financial reports before they were released publicly.
The action, taken by the office of the US Attorney for the district of New Jersey, accuses UK national Robert B. Westbrook of earning roughly $3.75 million in 2019 and 2020 from stock trades that capitalized on the illicitly obtained information. After accessing it, prosecutors said, he executed stock trades. The advance notice allowed him to act and profit on the information before the general public could. The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a separate civil suit against Westbrook seeking an order that he pay civil penalties and return all ill-gotten gains.
Buy low, sell high
“The SEC is engaged in ongoing efforts to protect markets and investors from the consequences of cyber fraud,” Jorge G. Tenreiro, acting chief of the SEC’s Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit, said in a statement. “As this case demonstrates, even though Westbrook took multiple steps to conceal his identity—including using anonymous email accounts, VPN services, and utilizing bitcoin—the Commission’s advanced data analytics, crypto asset tracing, and technology can uncover fraud even in cases involving sophisticated international hacking.”
A federal indictment filed in US District Court for the District of New Jersey said that Westbrook broke into the email accounts of executives from five publicly traded companies in the US. He pulled off the breaches by abusing the password reset mechanism Microsoft offered for Office365 accounts. In some cases, Westbrook allegedly went on to create forwarding rules that automatically sent all incoming emails to an email address he controlled.
Prosecutors alleged in one such incident:
On or about January 26, 2019, WESTBROOK gained unauthorized access to the Office365 email account of Company-1 ‘s Director of Finance and Accounting (“Individual-!”) through an unauthorized password reset. During the intrusion, an auto-forwarding rule was implemented, which was designed to automatically forward content from lndividual-1 ‘s compromised email account to an email account controlled by WESTBROOK. At the time of the intrusion, the compromised email account of Individual-I contained non-public information about Company-1 ‘s quarterly earnings, which indicated that Company-1 ‘s sales were down.
Once a person gains unauthorized access to an email account, it’s possible to conceal the breach by disabling or deleting password reset alerts and burying password reset rules deep inside account settings.