A Goldman Sachs programmer was found guilty on Friday of stealing high-speed trading software from his former employer.

Sergey Aleynikov, 40, was found guilty in the Southern District of New York on one count of stealing trade secrets and one count of transporting stolen property. He is scheduled to be sentenced March 18, and faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

The Russia-born programmer worked for Goldman Sachs until last year when authorities say he siphoned source code for the company’s valuable software on his way out the door to take a new job. The software is used to make sophisticated, high-speed, high-volume stock and commodities trades and earns the company “many millions of dollars in profits” each year, according to prosecutors.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti had called it “the most substantial theft that the bank can remember ever happening to it."

Aleynikov, a naturalized American citizen who immigrated from Russia in 1991, earned nearly $400,000 a year as a vice president with Goldman Sachs.

He was arrested in July 2009 at the Newark Airport in New Jersey as he returned from a trip to Chicago, where he’d met with his new employers at competing firm, Teza Technologies, where he was expected to earn about $1.2 million in salary.

After Aleynikov cooperated with agents and allowed searches of his computers and home, he was indicted seven months later.

His trial began Nov. 29. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote sealed the courtroom during portions of testimony involving the Goldman Sachs' proprietary software. Exhibits and transcripts pertaining to the company’s trade secrets were also sealed.

Authorities said Aleynikov stole “hundreds of thousands of lines” of source code from Goldman Sachs in the days before he left the company on June 5 last year. They said he downloaded various software from the Goldman Sachs network and transferred it to a storage website hosted in Germany before trying to erase his tracks from Goldman Sachs’ network. Company computer logs show that on at least two occasions, he transferred the data remotely while logged into his company’s network from his home computer. Prosecutors maintained that among the data he downloaded was source code constituting “a substantial portion of the company’s proprietary source code” related to high-speed trading.

Goldman Sachs only uncovered the theft in late June after it began monitoring https transfers and saw a large volume of data leaving its network, according to the complaint. The company initiated the monitoring after noticing suspicious activity on the network.

Aleynikov used a script to copy, compress, encrypt and rename files, and then upload them to the server in Germany. Once the data was transferred, the program used to encrypt the files was erased, and he allegedly attempted to delete the network’s batch history showing his activity.

Prosecutors said Aleynikov made several copies of the code and had it on his laptop when he flew to Chicago to meet his new employers at Teza Technologies, though they acknowledge that a search of Teza computers uncovered no copies of Goldman Sachs’ source code.

Aleynikov acknowledged taking the code but told FBI agents he only intended to collect “open source” software files on which he had worked, and that his collection of proprietary files on his last day of work had been inadvertent. His attorneys said he never gave the proprietary files to anyone else and that the portion of proprietary code he took inadvertently was miniscule — just 32 of about 1,224 megabytes of code — and hardly constituted the company’s “entire platform.”

*In this file photo taken April 19, 2010, people walk to work outside the Goldman Sachs headquarters, in New York. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2010 named the companies that used its emergency loan programs during the financial crisis and revealing how much they borrowed. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

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