Hackers Penetrate Nasdaq Computer Networks 106
PatPending tips a Wall Street Journal report claiming that hackers have repeatedly broken into the computer networks of the company running the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.
"The exchange's trading platform—the part of the system that executes trades—wasn't compromised, these people said. However, it couldn't be determined which other parts of Nasdaq's computer network were accessed. Investigators are considering a range of possible motives, including unlawful financial gain, theft of trade secrets and a national-security threat designed to damage the exchange. The Nasdaq situation has set off alarms within the government because of the exchange's critical role, which officials put right up with power companies and air-traffic-control operations, all part of the nation's basic infrastructure."
Trouble in the national casino! (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that 80% of activity in the market is program trading and that 70% of shares are held for 11 seconds or less, I think we have bigger problems. This whole shebang is not, strictly speaking, capitalism. It's parasitic roulette played with imaginary money. Of course, at the end of the week the players get to take home real money.
Re:Privatization FTL (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this the "military-grade security and government control" that prevents classified material being leaked to Wikileaks so effectively?
Re:Trouble in the national casino! (Score:5, Insightful)
No wealth is created by this kind of activity. The money that goes to the winners comes from your bank charges and insurance premiums.
Re:Privatization FTL (Score:2, Insightful)
> Well there's your first problem. What the hell is a private corporation doing controlling an entire nation's stock market? If it's something so huge and influential and important to the country it can be the target of attack to disrupt our economy, it should damn well be under Military-grade security and government control
Nasdaq doesn't control the entire nation's stock market. The SEC has taken aggressive steps over the least decade - with LARGE success, according to its stated intent - to create an ecosystem of many exchanges/trading venues (today about 8 core ones, and many more peripheral) to help make sure your decision to buy or sell stock can be carried out within the next millisecond even if one - such as Nasdaq - fails. It's a bad example, since Nasdaq failures are rare, but do you know how common serious ARCA, EDGX, NYSE, etc intraday failures have been over the last year? And how badly has this affected your life?
With respect, you should learn the minimal basics of today's US equity trading infrastructure before commenting.
With somewhat less respect, if you think disrupting the stock exchange is so influential and important, and threatens to disrupt our economy then ... while you have plenty of company in thinking so ... the truth IMO is that being able to trade shares in a certain fraction of the US GDP each and every day - nay each an every millisecond - isn't that important. If the law was changed so that you could only buy or sell stocks four times a year, do you really think capitalism would fall over? If so, explain.
And finally, with contempt for your intellegence/knowledge, while you can not-too-insanely argue that there is a real computer-based ("cyber"-) threat to the U.S. here, you just cannot be serious in thinking "miilitary-grade securtity" is helpful? The U.S. military? Giving better protection against computer threats than one talented random hacker? Are your referring to the Chinese military instead (not that I have any reason to believe they could begin to hold their own here either, but I know far less)? This just seems to come from some fantasy-land.