Companies use the Securities and Exchange Commission’s corporate filing system to share market-moving news with investors and the public. Getting an early peek at those filings would be very helpful to a thief.

That was the motivation for two computer hackers who tried to penetrate the system, known as Edgar, according to an indictment unsealed on Tuesday by federal prosecutors in New Jersey.

The authorities charged two men, both of whom are believed to be Ukrainian nationals, in a scheme to hack into the commission’s database and steal secret information that they could either trade on or sell to others.

Prosecutors said that by hacking into the Edgar system, the men, Artem Radchenko and Oleksandr Ieremenko, had stolen “annual, quarterly and current reports of publicly traded companies before the reports were disseminated to the investing public.”