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Hackers Find New Way To Cheat On Wall Street
GMGruman writes "The high-speed trading exchanges that conduct the business of buying and selling stocks and mutual funds are so fast that hackers can introduce delays of a few microseconds completely unnoticed by today's network monitoring technology — and manipulate prices in the process to reap millions of dollars to the detriment of everyone else, InfoWorld's Bill Snyder reports. This kind of activity creates new reason to distrust Wall Street and shows how the computer networks we all rely on for conducting business and moving information are ripe for undetectable hacking."
I work in this business as well, this article is pure nonsense. I honestly don't know what the fuck this guy is talking about. Artificial delays would be picked up on immediately, no matter how brief. And it's not like this shit is trading over the internet, all endpoints are known, there is no anonymity, if someone tried this shit they'd be in jail by the end of the day.
That's not a news article, it's an advertisement.
High-frequency trading networks, which complete stock market transactions in microseconds, are vulnerable to manipulation by hackers who can inject tiny amounts of latency into them. By doing so, they can subtly change the course of trading and pocket profits of millions of dollars in just a few seconds, says Rony Kay, a former IBM research fellow and founder of a cPacket Networks, a Silicon Valley firm that develops chips and technologies for network monitoring and traffic analysis.
(emphasis mine)
A man who claims companies are losing millions due to network latency sells tools to monitor network latency? A reliable source, I'm sure.
That's what we hear, anyway, whenever anyone proposes that maybe ever-higher-speed trading isn't such a great idea.
It's a load of crap, of course. Yes, liquidity is good. No, restricting trades to, say, one per second -- which is still faster than any trading ever took place during the centuries of stock trading before computer trading became common -- would not bring our economy to a screeching halt. In fact, it would probably encourage economic growth by encouraging actual investing instead of the giant casino that the stock market has become.
Of course, in a casino, the house always wins, and since in the case the house also owns the House and the Senate too, this is never going to happen. Sigh.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
While not directly for Wall Street, I've been at a couple of related industries (super five 9 HA hardware maker and a free stock website) and I'll wholeheartedly agree; the end results will get noticed faster than you can login to Ameritrade. And what is up with the completely false term "undetectable hacking?" That's got to be the stupidest term I've heard this century. There is no such thing as undetectable hacking. Shame on the coiner's lack of knowledge in computer security and forensics. FAIL.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?