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Subtle Cyber Attacks Could Tilt Global Economies
wiredmikey writes "A subtle, yet powerfully destructive force of electronic attacks may be working slowly and silently to disrupt elements of the world's market-based economies. Recent cyber-attacks on the European Emissions Trading Scheme shut down that exchange's carbon market just a few weeks ago. Along with the fear of lights-out DDoS attacks that has traditionally stalked electronic markets, and logically still does, new types of attacks by subtle manipulation could slowly turn electronic markets on their heads by corrupting their very legitimacy. What's worse? Attacking someone's borders, or slowly disrupting and degrading confidence in their entire national economic well-being?"
It seems as though, given a little time, the markets do an excellent job of corrupting their own legitimacy, and taking the entire national economic well-being with it. Just ask Iceland, or Ireland, or the US...
The majority of stock activity is exactly this electronic noise, it's the rule, not the exception. The whole equities market (and other ones) is a turbo-hyperactive instant messaging system of bid/ask channels and they are all basically crapflooded now at about 60-70% of daily trading volume. The "Carbon Market" is another huge scam handy for passthru moneylaundering & fraud operations. Unknown binaries have been lodged in key NASDAQ systems. The messaging "order flow" is arbitrarily frontrun (i.e. man in the middle message intercept).
The real question is what miserable slice of the activity actually represents rationally allocated capital, rather than this message crapflooding. My fave site for this topic http://zerohedge.com/ consistently nails so many anomalies, flash crashes, order stacking rule loopholes (which bids are bumped off to 'dark pools' under less than optimal logic) etc.
It would be better if there was a 5ms 'quanta' for market prices, at least that would set a minimum time-to-live for price quotes. It becomes less 'rational' as the time horizon asymptotically approaches zero.
--hongpong.com
Anonymous coward, the problem is not regulations, it is misuse of regulations. If regulations were a sure-fire way for the rich and powerful to gain and retain control over an economy, they would not be fighting them tooth and nail. But they are. Without regulations, they will do as they please, using market and extra-market forces to corrupt and control the market. With regulations, they may attempt regulatory capture, but they are always at the mercy of an informed and engaged electorate.
They already have power. Regulations do not concentrate power, they distribute it among the electorate rather than concentrating it in the hands of the rich and the ruthless. These ultra-rich would love nothing more than for you to do away with the one thing keeping them in check: government regulation.
If the government is giving power to certain groups, it is up to We, The People to correct that and take back control over our government.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"We're All Missing the Point on Computer Security"
Yep- that article was written ten years back, but it couldn't be more insightful and ahead-of-its-time in the context of this discussion.
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