From the Columbia Law School's CLS Blue Sky blog, January 26, 2022:
SEC Chair Gensler Speaks on Cybersecurity and Securities Laws
Thank you. It’s good to be with the Annual Securities Regulation Institute. As is customary, I’d like to note that my remarks are my own, and I’m not speaking on behalf of the Commission or SEC staff.
As some of you may know, I often like to talk about the founding of our nation’s securities laws in the 1930s.
So again, today, I’d like to discuss the ‘30s — but this time, I actually mean the 1830s.
In 1834, exactly a century before the SEC was established, the Blanc brothers in Bordeaux, France, committed the world’s first hack. The two bankers bribed telegraph operators to tip them off as to the direction the market was headed. Therefore, they gained an information advantage over investors who waited for the information to arrive by mail coach from Paris.
The brothers weren’t convicted for their actions, as France didn’t have a law against the misuse of data networks.[1] The Blancs thus pocketed their francs, point-blank.
You may be wondering what all this has to do with the SEC. Well, I think it’s telling that the world’s first cybersecurity attack involved securities....
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