The Securities and Exchange Commission says a cyber breach of a filing system it uses may have provided the basis for some illegal trading in 2016.
In a statement posted Wednesday evening on the SEC’s website, Chairman Jay Clayton says a review of the agency’s cybersecurity risk profile determined that the previously detected incident was caused by a software vulnerability in its EDGAR filing system.
The SEC chairman says this breach did not result in exposing personally identifiable information.
The SEC files financial market disclosure documents through its EDGAR system, which processes more than 1.7 million electronic filings in any given year.
Clayton’s statement also mentioned that a 2014 internal review was unable to locate some agency laptops that may have contained nonpublic information.
