Security Project
Corporate Espionage via Taxi Data

Security Project – Taxi Espionage
• Method – Analyze NYC Open Data on taxis to look for trip patterns between banks and companies that had significant financial events in
2013 that might inadvertently reveal sensitive information
• Data - We looked at 30GB of taxi trip data from the year 2013 that included date/time of the trip, start location and end location
(latitude longitude format)
• Sample Data

Security Project – Taxi Espionage
• We first hardcoded the GPS coordinates of the top banks
• We only looked at taxi trips that originated from the 16 largest banks in NYC

• We allowed a 100m radius – i.e. one block
• We tried several deltas and chose 100m as it gave us a lot of data to work with while still keeping all trips origins close to bank HQ.

• Filtered the data based on this criteria
• Ended up with a working set of around 2GB of taxi data that originated from close to major banks in NYC.

Security Project – Taxi Espionage

• Can we find increases between taxi movement from banks to these target companies that is correlated to the dates of these mergers?

Security Project – Taxi Espionage
• Looked at 8 companies that were all involved in large mergers in 2013.
Used these as destination targets for taxi data that originated from banks. • Looking for a spike in taxi traffic around the time of the deals.
• Can this information be used to predict anything about these mergers that isn’t publicly known (the state of the merger, predict stock prices, etc)? Security Project – Taxi Espionage
• Filtered the data again, this time only considering trips whose destination was within 100 meters of a target companies headquarters in NYC.
• Plotted a time series for each target company of trips per day (both per bank and over all banks) over the entire year of 2013 and looked for a spikes in trips.

Security Project – Taxi Espionage

This is what most data (6/8 companies) ends up looking like

Security Project – Taxi Espionage

Notice the spike in the beginning. Info or false positive?

Security Project – Taxi Espionage

Stock price of Dell in 2013. Silverlake was the buyer.

Security Project – Taxi Espionage

Noticeable activity in Nov/Dec. Spikes in 4 banks… Security Project – Taxi Espionage
• Publicis and Omnicron announced a merger in July 2013
• Our data shows significant movement towards the end of 2013.
• The