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NASDAQ and BATS DDoSed
DMandPenfold writes with a quote from an article in Computer World: NASDAQ and BATS saw their sites disrupted during the day on Monday and Tuesday respectively. The sites host company news and share price data, as well as vital information on live service status on the exchanges. It is understood, however, that while the websites were affected, the stock exchanges continued to trade as normal with no change to trading. A spokesperson at BATS said the exchange's site had been hit with 'an external Distributed Denial Of Service incident.' Our trading systems were not affected and there were no exchange customer disruptions associated with the incident.' ... NASDAQ told the Wall Street Journal that on Tuesday it experienced 'intermittent service disruptions on our corporate websites.' It is not known who initiated the attacks. In 2010, NASDAQ's Directors Desk online scheduling application was compromised by hackers. An FBI investigation found that the stock exchange's aging software and out of date security patches played a key part in the problems."
You mean people on wall street take shortcuts? That's crazy talk.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
9:36 am - a story is posted on Slashdot: Megaupload Co-Founder Allowed Bail.
11:18 am - a story is posted about outages to high profile web sites.
And to think that people were asking what harm could it do to give the Megaupload guy access to the internet...
right ?
Read radical news here
I'd be curious to know if a particular application-level vulnerability was used in this event. There has been several vulnerabilities of late related to Java/Apache/PHP such as the hash-collision vulnerability with exploit code here http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/51193/info that has demonstrated to be very effective - so much so that a single host can bring down a relatively large site by exhausting CPU on the web server.... does anyone know the particulars of this event??
http://xkcd.com/932/
I would be interested to know the possibility of simulating a robotrader DDoS attack by manipulating the data sources the robotraders query for stock information.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Ok, there are a lot of bean counters on Wall Street that like to keep operating costs at a bare minimum.
That being said, whenever you upgrade the main trading desks all members need to update theirs. And I know a lot of them are running under legacy systems. i.e. very hold, highly customize platforms, using lots of different systems, patched over the years, sketchy documentation, and some are still on big iron. So guaranteeing thousands of firms will shift over cleanly is kind of a big hurdle.
The exchanges do not like to update there systems.
I would be interested to know the possibility of simulating a robotrader DDoS attack by manipulating the data sources the robotraders query for stock information.
The automated traders use a low-latency multicast stream of market data (level 1 or depth of book) coming off of the exchanges. Stays totally within financial infrastructure / datacenters so unless you somehow got into the exchange hardware / software it would be impossible.
The attack was directed against the web sites, not the trading machines. The original "notice" is here: http://pastebin.com/it77tAvs
This was a small bot net DDoS attack. Whether or not this could have been dealt with more efficiently by better routers/firewalls or HA configs, I don't know.
IMHO this is some script-kiddie types who are in it for the lulz. What it demonstrates is even the room-temperature IQ types can get a hold of some fairly potent DDoS tools. So, serious attention needs to be paid to upgrading their infrastructure and IT security in general.
It is a good time to be in the IT Security field, if you're looking for work.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It does not sound like it is.
It would be hard. DdoS is a brute force attack, and the markets are fairly resilient when it comes to stuff like this. In the past 30 years there have only been a handful of incidents where the volume has overwhelmed the trading floors – and that involved either a large number of people or 9/11.
Price data is generated by trading activity. i.e. In order to overwhelm the pricing side one would need to generate a lot of offers (i.e., offer to buy/sell the stock – you don’t have to complete the trade.) And the exchanges are well suited for very heavy loads. So it would be hard to do it from the exchange end.
If would be hard to do it from the publishing end because there are a lot of different data sources. Doing it on this side would be easier.
What one wants to do is to create a discontinuity in the market – like the 2010 Flash Crash. Feed the market fake / odd data – small but subtle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash
If you want to know a big, heavy man down, don’t tackle him – trip him.