On July 8th, the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines, and The Wall Street journal all had massive glitches, and now a McAfee security expert is calling the events “suspicious”, while “hacktivist” organizations like Anonymous are bragging about the day. This was the same day that the Chinese stock market crashed.
According to Cointelgraph [1]:
Three major American corporations suffered technical difficulties at the same time, in what Wired has called a cyber-armageddon [2].
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The New York Stock Exchange claimed the problem that caused a halt to stock trading for more than three hours was an “internal technical issue” and “not the result of a cyber breach,” while the Department of Homeland Security told CNN there is “no sign of malicious activity” at the NYSE, or in the earlier outage experienced by United Airlines.
Security experts, including the controversial McAfee expert and an anonymous “Intel analyst,” however, are not so sure.
John McAfee published an article [3] on SiliconANGLE detailing his suspicions and surface research, arguing that:
“To determine whether a system as large as the one used by the NYSE has been hacked or not, cannot possibly be determined in a matter of hours. Every programmer, every systems engineer and every employee of an IT department in the world understands this well.”
He points to a the hack against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which was ongoing for a yearbefore someone noticed. “Most hacks are never noticed unless purposely looked for — a time consuming, costly and tedious process,” he said, adding, “I truly believe that the upper management of most large corporations and most bureaucrats, directors and politicians within our world governments do not understand this basic truth of the cyber world.”
Furthermore, based on his own research, McAfee says, “The Dark Web was rife with communications among a small group of people (allegedly members of Anonymous) congratulating themselves on a job well done on Wall Street.”
Several tweets have surfaced from Anonymous cells on twitter, but none have claimed responsibility.
The Intel analyst interviewed by Art Moore at WND was also suspicious, saying:
“I have been in this business way too long to believe in coincidences. I hear such a thing may happen, but I have never seen one.”
He explained that the “mission-critical systems” of major corporations and governments have communications, power, processing and storage redundancies built in that allow for a seamless “hot swapover” to keep them running if one part of the system is incapacitated.
“The odds of failure of three systems like this, simultaneously, are in the trillions to one,” he said of the NYSE, United Airlines and Wall Street Journal incidents.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Stock Market continues to collapse, taking $3.9 trillion worth of expected value with it, and launching the value of other assets such as Bitcoin and Litecoin to the moon.
It is important to be clear that there is no hard evidence yet as to whether there is a relationship between the Chinese crash and the technical incidents in America. However the timing cannot be ignored, and some argue that this is another move in the financial wars that have been going on for years.
Or perhaps, it is all just a big coincidence.
Sources:
[1] http://cointelegraph.com/news/114819/mcafee-nyse-outage-may-have-been-a-cyber-attack
[2] http://www.wired.com/2015/07/cyber-armageddon-think/
[3] http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/07/09/the-great-wall-st-hack-mystery/
