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A Bit of a Cyber-Coincidence?
First United’s flights are halted owing to a “glitch,” and now the NYSE?
Trading in all securities were halted on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday following earlier reports of technical difficulties, although NYSE-listed issues was still trading on other exchanges.
After the halt, U.S. stocks extended their losses, but in low volumes, with the S&P 500 hitting a session low and the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq both falling more than 1 percent.
“It’s under control. We’re just waiting for word. There’s no sign of panic at all,” Mark Otto of J. Streicher & Co in New York said from the NYSE floor.
The editors had a brief discussion about how to handle this news, given that we’d hardly wish to be the last cordial conservatives on the Internet to start screaming that we’re under a cyber-attack, but we wish to preserve our reputation for probity and don’t want to look like idiots a few hours from now.
For what it’s worth, DHS is claiming there’s no sign of malicious activity. No sign, that is, apart from United Airlines and the NYSE going down within hours of each other. While the Chinese markets are crashing. Then there’s that whole business about China lifting all our government employees’ personnel data. But apart from that, no sign of malicious activity.
The editors verdict: This may be a genuine coincidence. But no, you’re not entering fruitcake conspiracy-theory territory if it occurs to you to wonder whether we’re entirely safe on the cyber-front. We’re wondering, too.
Published in Foreign Policy, General, Science & Technology
Funny. I just (in last hour) ordered two dresses through Amazon that are identified as made in China.
Regardless of whether today’s developments were related to the Chinese, the fact is that we are under cyber-attack by them. What do we (or should we) do in case of any attack? Retaliate, of course.
“Stuxnet” the bastids.
I love the idea reissuing Letters of Marque, popularized by Josh Gelernter, Johan Goldberg, and others. Here.
Seems strange to me that anonymous is so quiet on this thread. A little too quiet, don’t you think?
I agree. Reasonable thing to suspect.
That is really a great idea. Tons of resources going unused and un-directed against our enemies. Letters of Marque are a way of harnessing real power until the country is able to get their arms around the whole problem. Thanks for the link.
I don’t want alarm anyone but I’ve been poring through the data and it seems that General Tso’s Chicken was up 3 points this morning.
Killjoy.
Here we were finally getting a chance to duck the CoC and be free-wheeling conspiracy kooks for a day and you have to ruin it with facts.
You must be a conservative or something.
Yes, and I was just starting to hyperventilate when kaboom: I read this voice of reasonableness. Please don’t be so quick to use your reason, FinP.
Of course, if you were dry running a plan to destroy the world that’s just how you’d want it to look.
The OPM Hack.
Evildoers scan the list of senior technical staff in charge of network security and design of quasi public systems like Air Traffic control and financial transaction. Perhaps someone who knows the back door access to selected router hardware and DNS servers.
Using the OPM data, focus on people who have children in college. Some of those technical people have children who are pursuing careers in the same field, following in Daddy’s footsteps if you will. Some highly sensitive info is likely to transfer from father to son.
Soon, a unknown high tech startup will interview potential engineers. During the interview, the applicant will want to display their technical knowledge and they outline some sophisticated encryption scheme.
The new employee unwittingly reveals all the secrets he didn’t realize were secrets.
Map showing the cyber attacks on US.
http://map.norsecorp.com/
We’ll know it’s war if the porn sites get nuked….
You guys being so nice must be because you’re setting me up for something. NOW I’m worried about a conspiracy!
The map isn’t working. Here’s a copy I got from a friend, with his comments:
Austin, you were right to think the way you do:
Here’s what they are saying:
From: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-08/what-first-world-cyber-war-looks-global-real-time-cyber-attack-map
Wolverines!!
Oh, is it too soon?
No, but it’s perfectly in line with letting the world know who the bottom is in this “relationship”.
So, I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I did grow up in a home with a father who was the head of the office of emergency services for the county (and maybe the state? Can’t remember) that is Ground Zero for the Big One (as in earthquake) in California. We basically lived on the San Andreas fault line. Growing up I heard a lot about how officials make plans for catastrophic emergencies that effect larger populations. One of the things that impressed me was how much intentional planning there was to make sure the population would not be informed about details that might cause mass panic. I am guessing that significant protocols have long been established by the government with Wall Street and other major institutions for how to answer if there they are hit with a cyber attack.
Really? What kinds of details, if you think you recall rightly, were they planning to withhold, and under what circumstances? I’ve worked on a lot of earthquake preparation campaigns in a number of countries, so this is really interesting — and very surprising.
Most of the people I worked with were in Turkey, where our focus was on trying to convince people to reinforce housing stock and take non-structural seismic risk mitigation measures like securing their heavy items to the wall. Various government agencies were trying, although not nearly as hard as they should have been, and not in a a sufficiently coordinated way, to train first responders, make sure that neighborhoods had helicopter landing pads, plan for sheltering large numbers of people whose homes had been destroyed. I can’t remember anyone expressing concern that people must be kept from panicking after the fact, though, and it doesn’t quite make sense to me: What can you do to keep people from realizing there’s been a major earthquake? When something like that happens, everyone knows. It’s hard to imagine an event that would be more difficult to cover up, although everyone in Turkey suspects that the death toll in the ’99 quake was much higher than the reported 17,000, and I’m sure they’re right to suspect it. But if that was covered up, it wasn’t to prevent people from panicking, but to prevent them from losing confidence in the government, and especially in the military. (It didn’t work, by the way: that’s a very under-appreciated factor in the subsequent history of Turkish politics, but that’s another story.)
A lot of the preparation did focus on trying to teach people what not to do during an earthquake — some people will do things out of panic that are unwise. If communication systems have been destroyed, you might be able to keep people in one part of the country from realizing there’s been a devastating earthquake in another part, but to what end?
I’m surprised to hear this, and really want to know more.
There are DoD regulations regarding the purchase of materials used in DoD contracts, so no, “most” of our parts don’t come from China.
In fact, there are rules about even acquiring the base components like steel from domestic suppliers. It’s been awhile since I worked for a defense contractor, but sourcing parts (a buyer’s gig, not mine) was becoming more and more of a headache as sub-contractors started disappearing when defense spending draws down.
Not to get too far into it, but a ton of smaller parts are built by “mom and pop” machine shops, for a host of reasons. When contracts go away, so do some of these shops, because of the tooling requirements for milspec parts are expensive to buy and maintain. No dollars, no shops.
Fun idea, but how do you know who’s hacking you?
“There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now in control of the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousands channels, or expand one single image to crystal clarity and beyond. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear.