By Jerry Robinson
FTMDaily.com
Yesterday’s mysterious three hour trading halt on the NASDAQ, which affected nearly $6 trillion in equity holdings, is officially being labeled as an unexplained “technical glitch.” Some have blamed the massive outage on high-speed computer trading algorithms. However, some experts are saying that this latest trading halt has all of the makings of a cyber attack.
Nasdaq outage resembles hacker attacks
While this may sound like an outlandish claim, U.S. financial institutions, banks, and credit unions have actually been the subject of a widespread set of cyber attacks allegedly launched by an Islamic group of hacktivists, known as the Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. You can read about some of these cyber attacks here.
But claims of a cyber attack against the NASDAQ this week actually make sense when you consider the rash of similar outages that have hit major U.S. corporations over the last several days…
- August 7, 2013… Apple experiences a major outage on many of its cloud based services for nearly three hours.
- August 14, 2013… A major service outage hits numerous Microsoft cloud services including Hotmail, Outlook, and Skydrive.
- August 14, 2013… The New York Times website mysteriously goes down for nearly 90 minutes. Experts call it a “cyber attack,” but the New York Times denies the claim.
- August 16, 2013… Google.com experiences an outage instantly causing global web traffic to plunge by 40%. Technology experts called it a “completely unprecedented event” but Google refuses to comment.
- August 19, 2013… Mysterious outage strikes Amazon.com and the Amazon Web Services cloud.
- August 20, 2013… A “technical error” at Goldman Sachs leads to a flood of erroneous trades in the options market.
- August 22, 2013… NASDAQ experiences a mysterious three hour trading halt. Experts say it resembles a cyber attack but officials at NASDAQ are mum.
So, what do you think? Is this all a coincidence? Or are these just the latest events in an ongoing global cyber war?
- Nasdaq crash triggers fear of data meltdown • The Guardian
- Hacker Reveals How Devastating A Cyberattack On The Stock Market Could Be • Randolph County Herald-Tribune
- Iran’s cyber warfare could hit public more than military: report • Washington Times
- Rep. Mike Rogers says cyber espionage is 'greatest national security threat' and US is unprepared • Birmingham News
- Russia to create ‘cyber-troops’ – Ministry of Defense • RT
