According to Reuters and ZeroHedge, a Russian immigrant and former Goldman Sachs developer named Sergey Aleynikov was picked up at Newark Airport on July 4th by the FBI on charges of industrial espionage. Sergey supposedly, prior to his early June exit from Goldman, copied, encrypted, and uploaded source code inferred to be the code used by Goldman Sachs to process in real-time (micro-seconds) trades between multiple equity and commodity platforms to a German server. While trying to cover his tracks, the system backed up a series of bash commands so he was unable to erase his history that would later give him away to Goldman and the authorities.

Coincidentally (or maybe not so much), the NYSE changed its methodology for reporting program stock trading. For example: On the week ending June 19, Goldman was ranked first on the NYSE program trading list. But on the week of June 22, Goldman didn’t appear on the list of the top 15 firms at all. It simply vanished without any explanation from the NYSE or Goldman at all. Later, the NYSE announced that it would change some of the data it used to calculate the trading report.

All of this may not mean anything to you, but to put it simply: The software that was stolen is what has given Goldman Sachs the leg-up on program trading for so long, earning it the number 1 position on the NYSE list for years, until a couple of weeks ago. The software is arguably worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Now that the software is gone, Goldman isn’t on that list anymore and the source code is in the wild.

So, where are the 32MB of encrypted files that Sergey uploaded to a German server, and who wants to use it?