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Quinn Emanuel and McDermott confirm breaches - Both US law firms traced to a single hacked employee. Published 2 hours ago Cybersecurity Writer Summarize with: Key Takeaways * Breach method: Both Quinn Emanuel and McDermott traced their incidents to social engineering attacks on single user accounts. * Data exposed: McDermott's breach affected Social Security numbers and health data among firm files. * Sector trend: Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Goodwin Procter, and WilmerHale have also faced recent breach disclosures. Prominent U.S. law firms Quinn Emanuel and McDermott said on Thursday that they suffered recent data breaches and had notified law enforcement, amid heightened cyber risks for firms that hold sensitive client and personal information. It was not clear who was responsible for the two breaches or whether they were related. Quinn Emanuel said in an August 25 letter to a lawyer for short seller Muddy Waters that some files related to the company were accessed in a breach less than two weeks earlier. Quinn Emanuel breach tied to Muddy Waters files. The letter, viewed by Reuters, said an "unauthorized third party obtained access through social engineering" on August 14, and that some of the information exposed involved Muddy Waters files that Quinn Emanuel obtained in a lawsuit in Florida. Quinn, in a statement Thursday, said it identified "a data security incident involving unauthorized access to stored files for a single software application through one temporarily compromised user account." The statement mentions a "limited" number of impacted client documents and adds that there is no ongoing unauthorized access to systems. Muddy Waters had previously asked a judge to bar Quinn's involvement in a lawsuit against the short seller in Texas, saying the firm had earlier represented Muddy Waters on related matters. In a statement Thursday, Muddy Waters said: "Just when we thought Quinn couldn't be more outrageous than eagerly representing new clients who want to sue old ones, we learned that Quinn failed to protect our sensitive information from social engineering hacking." Quinn Emanuel declined to comment about Muddy Waters' statement. The firm denied Muddy Waters' conflict-of-interest claims and said a single attorney at the firm briefly represented Muddy Waters on a different matter. McDermott reports breach to Vermont attorney general. McDermott reported its data breach last week to the Vermont state attorney general and said it affected Social Security numbers and health data among its files. McDermott, in a statement, said it responded to "an isolated social engineering incident involving a single user and a limited number of documents," and that it investigated with assistance from cybersecurity experts and engaged with law enforcement. "The matter has been resolved, and the firm's systems remain secure. The confidentiality and privacy of our client and firm information continue to be our highest priority," McDermott said. Law firms face rising breach wave. At least three other law firms, including Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer and Goodwin Procter, disclosed data breaches to U.S. state regulators last month, while WilmerHale was sued in July in a proposed class action over a data breach. In early August, Citadel, Point72, and Two Sigma were targeted in a coordinated Wall Street vishing attack. A June Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and an FBI Cyber FLASH Alert warned that UNC3753, also tracked as Luna Moth, Chatty Spider, Storm-0252, and Silent Ransom Group (SRG), targeted U.S. law firms in a vishing extortion campaign, sending individuals posing as IT technicians to exfiltrate data via USB media.

Meet the hedge fund billionaire who kickstarted Wall Street's newest tax dodge. illustration by philip smith for forbes ByJohn Hyatt, Forbes Staff. John Hyatt is a NYC-based Forbes staff writer covering Wall Street. Aug 31, 2026, 06:30am EDT After helping AQR pioneer a novel tax avoidance investment strategy, accounting PhD Hoon Kim left to start Quantinno. Thanks to thousands of wealth managers and their ultra-rich clients, assets have swelled from $2 billion to $70 billion in three years. The long-running stock bull market has left America's wealthiest with a tax problem: too many investment gains with too few losses. With major indexes marching ever higher, and as founders and early employees of tech firms accumulate fortunes in concentrated stock positions, it's become harder and harder for wealthy folks to identify losers that they can use to "harvest" losses to offset their capital gains. A fast-growing strategy designed to fix this problem has become the toast of the investment industry, from the Wall Street hedge funds crafting the products to the independent advisors hawking them to clients. In the so-called long-short tax-aware strategy, an investor uses leverage to make hundreds, even thousands, of additional bets on stocks - some that they own, and some that they short. (Shorting is betting that a stock will fall: you borrow shares, sell them and later buy them back, preferably at a lower price). The novel formula deliberately creates plenty of losses, on either its long or short positions, which investors can harvest to strategically offset gains elsewhere, while keeping most of their money invested in the rising stock market. Today, the assets committed to long-short tax aware strategies are fast approaching $200 billion, up from just a few billion five years ago. With an estimated $260 billion under management Greenwich-based AQR Capital Management, a 1,000-person hedge fund and asset manager, is well known as a pioneer of this trading strategy. Its success has prompted blue chip copycats from asset management giants like BlackRock, Nuveen, and Franklin Templeton to fellow quant hedge funds like Two Sigma and WorldQuant. All have recently launched or are exploring similar "long-short tax aware" offerings. However, AQR's biggest rival is a little known New York City-based firm called Quantinno Capital Management. In fact Quantinno's founder, a 57-year-old accounting PhD named Hoon Kim, actually helped create one of AQR's first long-short funds during his 12-year run at AQR. As of March 2026 Quantinno's assets were reported to be $48.4 billion across 10,600 individual accounts, up from less than $300 million five years ago, according to its website and public filings. This net assets figure has since been removed from Quantinno's website, but in less than six months assets have further ballooned to around $70 billion, says one wealth advisor familiar with the firm's numbers. "I would call their success remarkable. I've actually never seen anything like it," says Brent Sullivan, a tax analyst and founder of the blog Tax Alpha Insider. Become a member and unlock unlimited access, expert analysis and exclusive member benefits. Already a member? Digital Membership Billed monthly LESS THAN $2/WEEK Digital Membership Billed annually Digital Membership Billed biennially Premium access to exclusive events, thought-provoking conversations with global leaders and more, all available on-demand. Elevated browsing experience with fewer ads and unlimited article saving power an enhanced reading experience. ByJohn Hyatt John Hyatt is a staff writer who covers finance, investments and billionaire dealmakers. Contact Hyatt with suggestions, tips and scoops at +1-720-951-2080 (Signal) or [email protected]. Read our community guidelines.

AI-Powered 'vishing' attacks reportedly targeted top hedge funds. Turns out rogue AI isn't the only cybersecurity threat to be worried about. By Webb Wright Published August 5, 2026, 3:39 pm ET Reading time 2 minutes Amid all the recent reports of AI systems autonomously going off the rails and hacking into third-party organizations, it's almost easy to forget that human hackers are still out there, experimenting with AI in all kinds of nefarious ways. A new report from Bloomberg, however, is a reminder of just how quickly AI-enabled cybercrime is evolving - and how unprepared the world is to deal with it. According to the report, a litany of high-profile hedge funds, including Citadel and Two Sigma, were targeted by recent voice phishing, or "vishing," attacks, in which AI is used to simulate the voices of actual humans in an attempt to skirt security systems. Several private equity firms were also reportedly targeted. Two Sigma told Bloomberg it caught the attack in time before any of its internal systems were compromised. Citadel declined Gizmodo's request for comment. Point72, another hedge fund included in the attack, did not immediately respond to a comment request. IT experts have been warning for years that the proliferation of cheap, easy-to-use AI tools that mimic human speech or generate other kinds of deepfake content will escalate both the severity of scam attempts and the rate at which they occur. The world got a taste of this in 2024, when an employee at the Hong Kong branch of a multinational company was duped into wiring more than $25.5 million to scammers who had instructed her to do so using AI-generated deepfakes of company employees, including its chief financial officer. AI scams are also being deployed to tip political scales. Last summer, for example, someone (or a group of people working together) used AI to recreate the voice of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and then sent voice messages to foreign diplomats and federal officials. OpenAI also said in a June report that a fleet of scammers, all of whom appear to have been backed by the Chinese government, had been illicitly using ChatGPT to generate inflammatory social media content aimed at fueling Americans' resentment towards data centers, the power cells of the United States' AI industry. All the while, the market pressures of the AI race - combined with a total lack of federal regulation - have been pushing tech developers to build increasingly capable models, including ones designed to imitate human speech. (Such tools are often promoted as "companions" that can alleviate loneliness, even though research has indicated they can sometimes have the opposite effect.) OpenAI's latest voice model, GPT-Live-1, is engineered to imitate subtle nuances of human speech, and, in theory, make interacting with AI feel less awkwardly mechanical. By design, OpenAI's model cannot imitate the voices of real people; that was a lesson OpenAI had to learn the hard way after it received earlier public blowback for releasing a voice model that, to many people's ears, sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. This is all to say: Nobody should be surprised that vishing attacks are on the rise. Technologically-enabled scam artistry is a tale as old as time, and AI is arguably the most enabling tool ever invented in that regard. The real mystery is why more isn't being done to build actually effective safeguards into AI systems to prevent them from happening in the first place.