Bloomberg user notes leaked online

More than ten thousand private messages sent between users of Bloomberg’s financial terminals have leaked online, report Daniel Schafer and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of The Financial Times.

Schafer and Edgecliffe-Johnson write, “The leaked messages were uploaded to the internet by Steve Raaen, then a Bloomberg employee, while he was working for the company on a data-mining project for clients’ benefit. It is believed he intended to to upload them to a secure site.

“Mr Raaen, who left Bloomberg in March 2011, declined to comment. Bloomberg said use of such emails outside its system ‘would have been a clear violation of our policies’ and it was considering ‘all potential legal’ actions. Such a breach could not happen now, it added, due to new technology and ‘upgraded’ controls that would prevent such information leaving its system.

“The project on behalf of Bloomberg clients, called ‘message scraping,’ entailed Mr Raaen, a business manager, combing through traders’ messages to get better pricing information on financial products that are traded over the counter.

“The messages included trade information and other confidential details from global banks including Barclays, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Nomura JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.”

Read more here.