Hackers from Anonymous or China suspected of attacking the New York Stock Exchange



    Recently, we wrote about the causes of large-scale technological failures on exchanges. In early July 2015, a serious accident occurred on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) , as a result of which trading was stopped for several hours. Representatives of the trading platform explained what happened as a mistake in the operation of the electronic exchange system. The media said they were involved in the failure of hackers from Anonymous or China.

    What happened July 8th


    At 11:32 a.m. July 8, trading on the NYSE was stopped due to "internal technical problems" that are not the result of a "computer failure." At 15:10, resumption of trading and the "normal functioning of all systems" were announced .



    NYSE President Thomas Farley said in a conversation with CNBC reporters:

    I can’t tell you exactly what caused the accident. But we found out that it did not work as it should, and fixed the malfunction. We have no evidence that the problems were triggered by external influences.

    Representatives of the US presidential administration also monitored the situation and stated that the failure was purely technical in nature and was not caused by interference by intruders in the operation of exchange systems.

    Conspiracy theories


    Despite the assurances of the authorities and the management of the exchange, journalists doubted the veracity of the version of the internal failure. The reason for this was a suspicious tweet published in the microblog of the hacker group Anonymous (@ YourAnonNews ):



    I wonder if something bad will happen to Wall Street tomorrow ... you can only hope so.

    A tweet was posted about 12 hours before the NYSE Twitter account reported technical issues.

    The creator of McAfee antivirus, John McAfee, in his column for the British edition of IBTimes, said that the cause of the failure of the exchange could be the actions of hackers "like Anonymous." Allegedly, McAfee studied the dialogue of hackers in the dark part of the Internet (dark web), in which they congratulated each other on "successful work on Wall Street."

    McAfee believes that the failure was triggered by a DDoS attack on the NYSE network, however, researchers at the F-Secure information security company believe that such an attack would not have been successful, but the failure had occurred inside the system. Arbor Networks, a DDoS attack monitoring company worldwide, also did not notice unusual traffic spikes.

    Anonymous already promised to “erase the NYSE from the Internet,” but these threats did not end there. Including this fact feeds another version, according to which hackers from China attacked the American stock exchange.

    Journalists suggested that the cause of a possible attack could be widespread media coverage of the stock crisis in the Middle Kingdom. Allegedly, precisely because of this, the websites of the Wall Street Journal and Zero Hedge were attacked . NorseCorp’s

    interactive hacker attack map also showed attacks from China to the United States.



    Nevertheless, this does not mean that the exchange was attacked - every day many attacks of Chinese hackers on certain resources in the USA are recorded. Nevertheless, former broker Josh Brown during the NYSE crash noted that “some countries are clearly not happy with the way our media cover the affairs of its stock market”:



    Everything can be much simpler.


    Despite the existence of conspiracy theories, many observers agree that the cause of the failure was indeed caused by internal system problems. The creator of the analytical company Nanex (about which we published a series of materials ) Eric Hunsader (Eric Hunsader) told Fortune that he considers the error in updating the trading system to be the cause of the accident.

    The weak point of this version is the failure time - the exchange is unlikely to “roll updates” in the midst of a trading session. F-Secure's Sean Sullivan remarked to this that they could update a non-critical system, the failure of which, however, led to large-scale consequences. In his opinion, the human factor played a role here.

    Failures periodically occur not only on US exchanges, but also on trading floors in other countries, such as the Moscow Exchange. Errors often lead not to a halt in trading, but, for example, to incorrect display of trading data or incorrect calculation of guarantee security to hold a position (an error can even lead to premature closing of a transaction)

    In order to minimize possible damage, brokerage companies are developing various client protection systems. We will talk about how such protection is implemented in the ITinvest MatriX trading system in one of the following posts (you can read more about this at the link ).

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