The bestselling author of The Sellout tells the explosive story of the government’s crackdown on insider-trading networks—an investigation that has already racked up more than 60 convictions. In Circle of Friends, award-winning journalist Charles Gasparino—one of Wall Street's most knowledgeable observers—follows government investigators and prosecutors as they pursue one of the most aggressive and broad-reaching series of insider-trading cases in the nation's history. A richly textured page-turner of investigative journalism based on extensive reporting, Circle of Friends chronicles the massive federal crackdown that has already put some of the biggest names on Wall Street behind bars, including Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group, and Rajat Gupta, a former CEO of consulting giant McKinsey & Co. Other similarly sized targets are still waiting nervously, including the biggest one of them all—financial impresario Steve Cohen of SAC Capital, the giant hedge fund that has confounded regulators for years by cranking out a steady stream of market-busting returns. Gasparino goes behind the headlines to reveal how the government makes its case, using every tool at its disposal—and at great expense to taxpayers—to supposedly make the investing world safer for average Americans. Gasparino asks why federal officials are so eager to prosecute these cases: What is the real damage to individuals? Do average investors really care? He explores why insider trading is all the rage these days when the U.S. government has failed to bring a single criminal case against the culprits who caused the 2008 financial crisis. Circle of Friends is not a defense of insider trading, but it does offer an account of the politics of Wall Street crime fighting, revealing the behind-the-scenes ambitions that motivate headlines and burnish political careers. A riveting work of narrative nonfiction, as engrossing and explosive as fictional thrillers of the finest magnitude, Circle of Friends is a wakeup call to the investing public.
The book presents different perspectives that explain the prohibition of insider trading and the way it affects various aspects of life on the stock market.
The authors analyze the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and SEC regulations regarding selective disclosure and insider trading.
Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, discusses the state of government and the depths of its political corruption.
Since 2001, the CERT® Insider Threat Center at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has collected and analyzed information about more than seven hundred insider cyber crimes, ranging from national security espionage to theft of trade secrets. The CERT® Guide to Insider Threats describes CERT’s findings in practical terms, offering specific guidance and countermeasures that can be immediately applied by executives, managers, security officers, and operational staff within any private, government, or military organization. The authors systematically address attacks by all types of malicious insiders, including current and former employees, contractors, business partners, outsourcers, and even cloud-computing vendors. They cover all major types of insider cyber crime: IT sabotage, intellectual property theft, and fraud. For each, they present a crime profile describing how the crime tends to evolve over time, as well as motivations, attack methods, organizational issues, and precursor warnings that could have helped the organization prevent the incident or detect it earlier. Beyond identifying crucial patterns of suspicious behavior, the authors present concrete defensive measures for protecting both systems and data. This book also conveys the big picture of the insider threat problem over time: the complex interactions and unintended consequences of existing policies, practices, technology, insider mindsets, and organizational culture. Most important, it offers actionable recommendations for the entire organization, from executive management and board members to IT, data owners, HR, and legal departments. With this book, you will find out how to Identify hidden signs of insider IT sabotage, theft of sensitive information, and fraud Recognize insider threats throughout the software development life cycle Use advanced threat controls to resist attacks by both technical and nontechnical insiders Increase the effectiveness of existing technical security tools by enhancing rules, configurations, and associated business processes Prepare for unusual insider attacks, including attacks linked to organized crime or the Internet underground By implementing this book’s security practices, you will be incorporating protection mechanisms designed to resist the vast majority of malicious insider attacks.
Insider expert Jonathan Moreland tells readers exactly what insider information is, where to find it, and how to use it. In these pages, he covers how to analyze insider purchases and sales; the difference between legal and illegal insider trading; special screens of insider data for use with specific investment approaches; and where to find the cheapest and best insider data.
"The rise over the last two decades of a powerful new class of billionaire financiers marks a singular shift in the American economic and political landscape. Their vast reserves of concentrated wealth have allowed a small group of big winners to write their own rules of capitalism and public policy. How did we get here? ... Kolhatkar shows how Steve Cohen became one of the richest and most influential figures in finance--and what happened when the Justice Department put him in its crosshairs"--Amazon.com.