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The Hacking of NASDAQ
puddingebola (2036796) writes Businessweek has an account of the 2010 hacking of the NASDAQ exchange. From the article, "Intelligence and law enforcement agencies, under pressure to decipher a complex hack, struggled to provide an even moderately clear picture to policymakers. After months of work, there were still basic disagreements in different parts of government over who was behind the incident and why. 'We've seen a nation-state gain access to at least one of our stock exchanges, I'll put it that way, and it's not crystal clear what their final objective is,' says House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, who agreed to talk about the incident only in general terms because the details remain classified. 'The bad news of that equation is, I'm not sure you will really know until that final trigger is pulled. And you never want to get to that.'"
Would we even notice if it was hacked?
Was it a foreign government, or your own government?
Quite frankly, I find either plausible.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
'We've seen a nation-state gain access to at least one of our stock exchanges, I'll put it that way, and it's not crystal clear what their final objective is,' says House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers
Ummm to make money or destabilize our economy?
Makes one feel good that you are the head of the Intelligence Committee.
The security of the stock exchanges is really pretty bad. Low latency access means no firewalls and few application level checks. For the longest time people were sending ethernet raw packets...There is a perverse incentive not to properly secure exchanges because security is slow.
I forget which one, but as I recall the solution was to restore everything to the state before the hack, erasing the tainted trades along with all the valid ones.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
i wonder what newly minted organization that will undoubtedly be called in to 'protect us' while stripping yet more privacy and liberties. (of course getting budgeted billions to do the job). oh wait - theyve already announced it. and it's the benevolent wisdom of the usual suspects that will save us all!
Oh my god! What can I do to prevent cyberspies from planting a digital bomb in my computer banks? :O
Odds are the hack will turn out to be a "rogue trader" at a major US bank, and this breach in morality & federal law will be dismissed as "big banks being big banks".
Wow. Something happened, but we don't know what or why.
If one were to record all input/output, all disk writes, and all memory changes would one not be able to literally go back and see what was done? I'm not sure if this is a feasible technical solution. However what I'm imagining is something like git. Whenever a change is submitted it logs it. What if every bit of data written to the disk were logged, that is the difference between what was and what is? Do the same thing for memory and input/output from the network. If these features were added at a hardware level any malware wouldn't even be able to detect it. While this still leaves the problem of detecting the malware, determining what was done would be much much much simpler (I think).
While this wouldn't be a cheap solution it probably would be a good solution for at least critical infrastructure.
It probably wouldn't be something you attach to facebook's server, but it might be something you attach to Google's servers, backbone routers, Amazon Cloud services and similar (if this is being used by critical infrastructure, I'd hope not, but... if it is, or an attach might impact significant portion of the economy), exchange's servers, development servers at Microsoft, Apple, Google, Adobe, and similar, as well as any other developer's development systems, etc.
or, it was just a bug somewhere that was triggered.
People panic way to quick when something happens with computers.
Isn't this probaly one of the foremost National Security issues of the US? The freaking Stock Exchanges? You're telling me they don't know to what end, or who was in it?
If even part of this is true, this country really is FUCKED! All the way to the top!
Isn't wall street doing enough to destroy our economy for their short term benefit? If I was a hacker, I'd pick a more interesting target than one which collapses on its own greed twice in a decade.
I can only guess you didn't read even the first sentence of TFS. The attack occurred in 2010, so this is hardly a case of "people panic way to quick".
"or it was just a bug" - we have a copy the malware they used, and they exploited at least two zero-day vulnerabilities, and were accessing the system for months.
This incident was kind of a big deal. Someone with sophisticated exploit capabilities had run of Nasdaq's network for several months.
The NASDAQ's Director's Desk computers are not trading systems. Lots of hype, speculation, perhaps a paycheck for Keith Alexander and Michael Chertoff.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has analytically demonstrated that the same people entrusted to operate our financial markets (the CEOs, SEC regulators, and rating agency officials) are the #1 threat to U.S. economic security. Their short term unenlightened self-interest results in economic death spirals.
For details, see Blunden's slide deck on Chinese Cyber espionage: http://www.belowgotham.com/ODE-TO-MIKE-ROGERS.pdf
Our political leaders and their lie, and lie, and lie. All in service of corporate power.
He has lied, willfully exaggerated and generally acted like a complete piece of shit countless times. Do not believe anything out of that man's mouth, ever.
Look no further than a too-big-to-fail company, e.g. Goldman Sachs.
The security of the stock exchanges is really pretty bad. Low latency access means no firewalls and few application level checks. For the longest time people were sending ethernet raw packets...There is a perverse incentive not to properly secure exchanges because security is slow.
Technically true. However in the quest for low latency there has been a tendency for some to colocate with the exchange. So if an exchange system and a broker system are in the same high physical security room and have a direct connection between them then the risk is mitigated to a degree.
It's all part of getting the rich richer and the rest frightened.
Don't be tricked by the conmen.
yep, and want to bet said newly minted organization will have a 3 letter acronym.
If you review the details, the attackers were on one specific non-trading application owned by Nasdaq and had some access to their internal network. There is no evidence that they had any access to the exchange's systems, which are on a segregated network. In other words "the exchange" was not hacked at all.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
So, I guess we are at stock-exchange threat level Orange? How long until we see the color-coded threat-level banners at the top of every trading site?
Mark my words, this is just setting up for the future. Now, the next time trillions of assets magically "disappear" (as the did in 2007 and 2008), we can avoid all those pesky protests against the bankers and instead just blame some other country and go to war with them. War being, coincidentally, also extremely profitable to the same people who will have "disappeared" those assets.
The Chinese, the French, the Israelis—and many less well known or understood players—all hack in one way or another.
But never the USA.
Watch this Heartland Institute video