Cyberattack Can't Be Ruled Out for New York Stock Exchange Outage, Say Analysts

No, not at all.

I mean c'mon, all these outlets went down simultaneously, WSJ, NYSE, United Airlines? Yeah, musta been a glitch (rolls eyes).

At the Epoch Times:

Trading in securities was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday at 11:32 a.m. “All open orders will be canceled. Additional information will follow as soon as possible,” stated a brief message on its website.

What exactly caused the shutdown is still under investigation, yet foul play could be a factor.

Two major issues have hit the global stock markets hard. Stock markets around the world fell on Monday after the “no” vote in the Greece referendum. In China, things are even more severe, where its stock bubble burst and its markets have plummeted around $3.25 trillion in value.

“I would say there is a high probability that adversarial nation-states are behind it, based on their increasingly advanced capabilities and brazenness,” said Casey Fleming, CEO of BLACKOPS Partners Corporation, which does counterintelligence and protection of trade secrets for Fortune 500 companies.

The NYSE, on its twitter account, quickly denied the possibility of a breach: “The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach.”

The attacks on NYSE and United Airlines are being reported as separate incidents with separate causes, but being publicly-traded companies they have to be careful about what they say. The cybersecurity community, in particular, is still not ruling out the possibility of a cyberattack.

According to cybersecurity news service, The Cyberwire, “Early indications are that there’s no sign of cyber attack, but of course this bears watching.”

Fleming noted, the Chinese stock exchange is down 25 percent this week, and “there is a possibility they are trying to manufacture a softer landing to the forecast hard landing.”

A representative from the New York Stock Exchange gave only vague details. Marissa Arnold, an NYSE spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement simply that, “We’re currently experiencing a technical issue that we’re working to resolve as quickly as possible,” and noting that updates will be provided “as soon as we can.”

Fleming emphasized that it could also be an unrelated error, and that hackers may have nothing to do with the system going down. “It could be someone left a soda can on top of a server in the data center, or a rat chewing on a cable.”

“But the coincidence is way too high,” he said, noting that several systems seem to have gone down around the same time. “United Airlines was down after a computer glitch, other websites are down, and now the New York Stock Exchange is down.”

PREVIOUSLY: "Cyberwarfare in Real Time," and "New York Stock Exchange Hit by Glitches or Hacked?"