UBS Rogue Trader Underscores Insider Threats Facing Enterprises

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/UBS-Rogue-Trader-Underscores-Insider-Threats-Facing-Enterprises-368962/

By Fahmida Y. Rashid
eWEEK.com
2011-09-15

The arrest of a rogue stock trader at UBS, one of the world’s largest 
and most recognized banks, should serve as a wake-up call to all 
enterprises that many security threats actually come from inside their 
organization rather than from outside, according to several security 
experts.

London police arrested a rogue trader with the Swiss bank Sept. 15. In a 
terse four-line statement, UBS said the trader is suspected of causing 
an estimated $2 billion loss due to unauthorized trades. While UBS has 
not named the trader, the Financial Times identified him as Kweku 
Adoboli, a director in European equity trading for the Zurich-based 
bank.

"The matter is still being investigated, but UBS's current estimate of 
the loss on the trades is in the range of USD 2 billion," UBS said in 
the statement. No client positions appear to have been affected.

The bank was working to "get to the bottom of the matter as quickly as 
possible, and would spare no effort to establish exactly what has 
happened," UBS CEO Oswald Grübel wrote in an internal memo to staff, a 
copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.

The UBS incident echoes what cyber-security experts have been saying for 
a while now: insiders are among the biggest threats facing 
organizations.

[...]

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