Equifax Web Site Designer Fined $50,000 And Confined To Home Over Insider Trading

An anonymous reader writes:
A 44-year-old, Georgia-based programmer -- who'd been working at Equifax since 2003 -- has been sentenced to eight months of home confinement and a $50,000 fine for insider trading. Working as Equifax's Production Development Manager of Software Engineering in August of 2017, he'd been asked to create a web site where customers could query a database to see if they were affected by a yet-to-be-announced security breach for a high-profile client. Guessing correctly that it was his own employer's breach, he'd used his wife's brokerage account to purchase $2,166.11 in 'put' options betting that Equifax's stock price would tumble -- and when it did, he'd scored a hefty profit of $75,167.68.

'As part of his SEC settlement, he must also forfeit $75,979, the ill-gotten funds, plus interest,' ZDNet reports, noting that the transactions 'came to light after Equifax started internal investigations into several reported cases of employee insider trading.' Another federal complaint also alleges that another Equifax executive avoided $117,000 in losses by selling all $1 million of his stock options -- the same day he'd performed a web search about how Experian's stock was affected by a 2015 security breach, but two weeks before Equifax's breach was announced. That case is still ongoing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.