Well, now it's time for our daily Bloomberg Law Brief, exploring legal issues in the news. And today Bloomberg Law hos doing grosso at Michael Best discussed the hack of the SEC's EDGAR document filing system, which granted hackers access too closely guarded secrets from American companies. They speak with Robert Hawckett, a professor at Cornell University Law School, and Peter Henning, a professor Edwayne State University Law School. Peter, the you know, most of the EDGAR system is publicly
available information. That's kind of the point, but there is part of it that has some confidential information that apparently is the subject of this hack. Explain exactly what it is that got hacked into here. Well, the security breach came through a portal that the SEC has so that companies that recently went public could essentially take it for
a test drive and past materials on EDGAR. The requirement is that whenever a company makes its disclosure quarterly or annual earnings, that has to do that um immediately and make it available to all investors at the same time. So it was a way for them to test it UM. But there are companies that will make filings. Uh. For example, I p O s Now you can make what's essentially
a dark filing. You can put information in there that isn't available to the public, that might have been available to the hackers and would give them maybe some insight information about what was going to happen at those companies and perhaps others if they rummaged around through the system. You just don't know what you're going to find. Bob, the attack occurred last year. The SEC just disclosed it on Wednesday. Is that against its own advice to companies
to announce cyber attacks promptly. Well, it's it's it's hard to tell the type attrition. I mean, the problem is, um, you know that the SEC is sort of forced start faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, if it reveals information that turns out not to be really that important in the long gre term but sort of stokes a panic or stokes sort of excess concern in the short term, Uh, than it might well, you know, sort
of think better about having disclosed something too quickly. So it's not sure whether to tell anybody right away because it doesn't want to cause more panic than might be warranted. On the other hand, that being said, if it does indeed turn out to be a significant problem, but then of course the SEC looks to have egg on its face when it turns out that it knew the information
even sooner. In this particular case, I think what's particularly important or maybe worth noting, is that it didn't reveal the information until it determines that somebody might actually have used some still gotten information in order to engage in some form of insider trading. And that's something the SEC
apparently only just learned. And as Robert Hockett, a professor at Cornell University Law School, and Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State University Law School, speaking with Bloomberg Law host June Grasso and Michael Best, you can listen to Bloomberg Law weekdays at one pm Wall Street Time here on Bloomberg Radio and now among the top legals to worries from Bloomberg Law. President Trump has opened himself to what could be a new wave of legal challenges with
a revised travel ban. Two groups that are challenging the earlier version of the policy at the Supreme Court say they still see restrictions as targeting Muslims. That's Even though the new policy adds two countries with few Muslims, banning everyone from North Korea and some government officials from Venezuela,