US: Former Equifax exec charged with insider trading

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO (AA) - The Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges Wednesday against a former Equifax executive for selling his company stock before public disclosure of a massive data breach.

Jun Ying, the former chief information officer for Equifax, is alleged to have sold $1 million in stock after investigating a data breach at the company last year.

He made the transactions several weeks before the breach, which affected an estimated 148 million Americans, was made public last September and Equifax stock price began to fall.

Ying saved $117,000 by selling before the breach was announced, the SEC said.

“As alleged in our complaint, Ying used confidential information to conclude that his company had suffered a massive data breach, and he dumped his stock before the news went public,” Richard Best, the director of the SEC’s Atlanta Regional Office, said in a statement. “Corporate insiders who learn inside information, including information about material cyber intrusions, cannot betray shareholders for their own financial benefit.”

The data breach was especially horrific because hackers were able to access extremely sensitive information including names, dates of births, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers.

Equifax tapped Ying to determine if the credit monitoring firm had been hacked in July.

The following month, Ying texted an associate that the breach seemed bad, according to federal authorities. He then researched the effect of other hackings on companies’ stock prices. He sold his shares in Equifax just hours later.

“The alleged actions of this defendant undermine the public’s confidence in the nation’s stock markets,” the FBI said in a statement.

Equifax reported Ying’s actions to the government soon after the breach was announced and fired him in October.

"We take corporate governance and compliance very seriously, and will not tolerate violations of our policies,” Paulino Do Rego Barros, interim chief executive of Equifax, said in a statement.