The applications have already come in for scrutiny by United States regulators concerned they are being used by terrorists, organised criminals and finance market participants.

Wickr was famously used by Malcolm Turnbull during the Liberal leadership battle earlier this year.

As ASIC marks its five-year anniversary of taking over the role of market supervision from the Australian Securities Exchange, commissioner Greg Yanco conceded the regulator had little in its armoury to defend against secret messaging apps.

"The new technologies where messages may disappear or may be held somewhere else are a major challenge for an enforcement agency."

"We're investing in people and technology to meet those challenges as best we can."

"It is certainly a serious challenge," he added.

So far there have been no inroads made into how to monitor the information being exchanged through these smartphone apps.

Insider traders and market manipulators are adept at using chatrooms and messaging services, as evidenced by the recent clampdown on Libor (the London interbank offered rate) rigging in the United Kingdom and the alleged manipulation of bank bill swap rates in Australia by local bank staff using chatrooms.

Mr Yanco also revealed ASIC had only recently developed the technology to properly monitor potential insider trading rings, and manipulation of foreign exchange and commodity trading using derivative products.

Until the new monitoring technology was rolled out ASIC had been relying on whistleblowers and the goodwill of market participants to report insider traders.

"We're bringing capacity and capability to be able to look for serial insider traders. That's happening now. We're just bringing that new process online and hopefully in five years we'll be able to do that," Mr Yanco said.

Finding hits

The new technology will allow ASIC to identify insider trading rings in the near future, thanks in part to a new market rule that requires brokers to provide client ID numbers so ASIC can monitor trading activities.

"The new system with the client information and the capacity means we can go and interrogate the system in an active way of looking for insider trading, by going back and saying, tell me who made profits before announcements often? And then are there any links between that trading? Are there patterns between the stocks for person a, person b and person c?"

"We've just got that capacity coming on now. We've recently just found a 'hit' [an insider trading ring]."

Mr Yanco said ASIC had been working with some contract-for-difference providers to have data of trading activities through their businesses captured by the surveillance system.

"We're also getting some of the [over-the-counter] data so some of that FX derivative stuff is in that which means we can broaden our reach in markets that we're monitoring, as well as look at cross-market manipulations and cross-market insider trading where people are using CFDs for insider trading."

Since ASIC took over market supervision on August 1 in 2009, 38 people have been prosecuted for insider trading as a result of investigations by the regulator. So far 32 of those cases have gone to court resulting in 27 convictions. In the first six months of this year alone, ASIC achieved four convictions for insider trading.

Over the same period, ASIC has had to increase its overall surveillance with the emergence of high-frequency trading, the entry of Chi-X and the proliferation of complex derivative and hybrid products.