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Hackers Penetrate Nasdaq Computer Networks

Posted by Soulskill on from the turn-on-your-firewall-gentlemen dept.

PatPending tips a Wall Street Journal report claiming that hackers have repeatedly broken into the computer networks of the company running the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. "The exchange's trading platform—the part of the system that executes trades—wasn't compromised, these people said. However, it couldn't be determined which other parts of Nasdaq's computer network were accessed. Investigators are considering a range of possible motives, including unlawful financial gain, theft of trade secrets and a national-security threat designed to damage the exchange. The Nasdaq situation has set off alarms within the government because of the exchange's critical role, which officials put right up with power companies and air-traffic-control operations, all part of the nation's basic infrastructure."

5 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. False flag? by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Given the government's insistence they need to have power to kill-switch the internet, I can't help wondering if this was staged.

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    1. Re:False flag? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Given the government's insistence they need to have power to kill-switch the internet, I can't help wondering if this was staged.

      From that comment I can tell you're actually familiar with how politics works.

      Unfortunately that goes so strongly against the combination of what most people are taught growing up plus what they would naively like to believe that you're likely to encounter a lot of irrational resistance. It's the kind of "yeah yeah how's that tin-foil hat fitting you" dismissal from people who refuse to seriously research the idea and look for past instances of it, yet feel that their highly emotional stance is a valid one. Perhaps they could start to enlighten themselves by researching Operation Northwoods to see what kind of false-flag operations our government is seriously prepared to use. Government is full of primitive asshats who subscribe to consequentialism; that is, the notion that the ends justify the means.

      Most ideas in politics like an "Internet kill-switch" are presented as proposals. They're more than that. They're more like "this is what we fully intend to do anyway" or they're more like "this is what we have been doing anyway and are now trying to legitimize by signing into law" (remember the retroactive immunity for warrantless wiretapping?). The proposal stage leads to a stage of framed debate, during which time the emphasis is placed not on the importance of civil rights and limited government, but instead on terrorists, hackers, or some other outside threat serving as a boogeyman.

      It's good old "correlation does not equal causality" again, and I'll explain the cart-before-horse nature of it. This is all designed to look like these actions are the effect of reasonable debate and popular support. In reality the appearance of debate and the drumming up of support is the effect of these actions. The ones who push for these increasingly fascist measures understand one thing very well: they only need a moment of support and it will be permanently enshrined in law, never to be repealed, no matter how many later regret getting suckered by the fear-based rhetoric. Understand this and you'll rarely (if ever) be surprised by anything you see on the news.

      As to whether this particular event was staged, I don't have proof one way or the other. It does remind me of a quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt: "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way."

  2. Wall Street Bonuses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wall Street Bonuses last year was $20.3 billion.
    I think it's obvious who is hacking the system.

  3. Genetic by Kingrames · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You know, it won't be long before the algorithms used for trading become pseudo-genetic, and start to do this kind of stuff themselves.

    The trading that goes on is influenced as much by meta-information as it is solid information.
    For all we know that could be part of the system by now already.

    I wouldn't be surprised - in fact I'd EXPECT that words like "google" "fox" and "recession" are either hard-coded into algorithms or the hardest-hitting highest profile terms used to weigh the value of stocks.

    There's no way you can design a secure system. Attacks like this should be considered a constant, and you need to find a smarter way to discourage them.

    I say that the best way is to design a system with low-hanging fruit to serve as detection of an attack, which will shut down access to the higher level stuff when it detects intrusion - or far better, replace real information with fake information. Make the attackers think they've succeeded, feed them false positives and misinformation, and then relax knowing your information is secure. In this way you're not so much building a wall that can't be broken down, you're attacking a soft target. No idea how effective it'd be in practice though.

    Don't pay any attention to this though, I'm just rambling.

    --
    If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
  4. Fat cats and risk by currently_awake · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think a fundamental fact of the rich: they never gamble with -their- money, just yours.