Recently there have been some stock scams to hit email inboxes across the nation. These scams are slightly different because they don't use hacking but social engineering. An example of one is when the false rumor Steve Jobs had a heart attack, the news effected the stock price for a short time but long enough for the scammers to make money on the drop in price.
Anthony Bettini, a senior manager at McAfee Avert Labs says "What would happen if a person built up a short position in a major software company and posted a handful of vulnerabilities with exploits to the Full Disclosure mailing list? t is possible people are already using zero-day threats for financial gain, not simply for embedding them within password-stealing Trojans but for taking short or options positions in equities and derivatives. It's clear that spammers have figured out ways to profit from securities markets: we have received lots of penny-stock spam."
