Wednesday, July 08, 2015

Are we in the Middle of a Ginormous Cyber Attack?

United Airlines went down hard this morning, with flights grounded nation-wide due to a "router problem."

Now the New York Stock Exchange has been down hard for hours over a "technical issue" (they're saying, at the moment, that it's not a cyber attack, but I can think of reasons why they would say that even if it wasn't true).

Both of these things, by the way, the day after Julius "zeekill" Kivimaki was convicted on 50,700 hacking charges, including Lizard Squad's assaults on the Playstation Network, Xbox Live and Tor. Coincidence?

Update: Turns out the Wall Street Journal was also knocked offline. "Homeland Security" bureaurat Jeh Johnson says "It appears from what we know at this stage that the malfunctions at United and at the stock exchange were not the result of any nefarious actor." Which, if the usual DC measure of honesty and competence obtains, means the malfunctions at United and the stock exchange were almost certainly the result of a nefarious actor.

Update, early Thursday morning: So now I hear that Anonymous sent out a tweet to the effect of "it would be a shame if anything bad happened on Wall Street today" -- at midnight before the NYSE went down. I'd say that pretty much confirms my suspicions. I say "I hear" because I'm hearing it on Wednesday night's episode of Free Talk Live. So if you're interested, why not give it a listen? If you're not a fan of FTL already, you should be.

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