A fired Morgan Stanley broker who will be sentenced next week for stealing customer data may have had that information stolen by Russian hackers, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Galen Marsh was hired as a sales assistant with Morgan Stanley in 2008. He is accused of making more than 5,000 searches on the brokerage’s computer systems using identification numbers of other brokers or branches, according to court documents cited by the Journal. He would then copy client names, contact information and account numbers to his own server, the newspaper writes. Marsh was caught in December 2014, fired in January 2015, and pled guilty in September to one felony charge of exceeding authorized access to a computer, according to the paper.
Marsh’s lawyers made the Russian-hacker connection in a request to the court that he be sentenced to a period of probation rather than prison, according to the Journal.
U.S. investigators say Marsh’s home server remained compromised between Oct. 6 and Oct. 31, a few weeks after which the data on 1,200 clients popped up on the text-sharing website Pastebin and then on Twitter, according to the paper.
A Morgan Stanley spokeswoman tells the Journal the firm is also aware Russian criminals may have had a hand in the matter — an angle that came to light in forensic examinations of Marsh’s computer. She stresses none of the clients affected had lost any money as a result of the breach.
Marsh says he wanted the client information to understand how other brokers handled customers’ accounts, and he never intended to sell it, according to the Journal. He maintains he didn’t put the data online.