The authorities said the traders seeking an illegal edge provided “shopping lists” to hackers for the kinds of news releases they wanted and the companies they wanted to trade on. The men obtained information from more than 30 companies, including Bank of America, Clorox, Caterpillar and Honeywell, the authorities said.

But the traders were also deliberate. The authorities said they traded ahead of the information contained in only about 800 of the hundreds of thousands of releases they got a sneak peek at — indicating a methodical and well-timed approach to concealing their activities.

In multiple instances, the men communicated via email and online chat messages, boldly stating what they were doing, the authorities said. At one point in 2012, for example, one of the defendants wrote in Russian in an online chat message, “I’m hacking prnewswire.com.” In another instance, a defendant sent 96 stolen news releases to someone with a subject, in Russian, that read “fresh stuff.” The email said, “If he says he does not know what this is about, tell him ‘quarterly report,’ ” according to the indictment.

The authorities monitored some of the defendants for years, the indictment said. In November 2012, it said, they seized the laptop of one of the hackers and found about 200 nonpublic news releases from PR Newswire.

The people charged in the New Jersey indictment with breaking into the newswire networks were Ivan Turchynov, 27; Oleksandr Ieremenko, 24; Arkadiy Dubovoy, 51; Igor Dubovoy, 28; and Pavel Dubovoy, 28.