Alleged Hackers Fail to Disrupt NYSE
October 10, 2011
Whoever claimed to be ready to take down the web site of the New York Stock Exchange today wasn’t.
The raid that was supposed to materialize at 3:30 p.m. didn’t.
Or if it did, it did not have the desired effect.
The threat
Operations of the public web site of the New York Stock Exchange that carries the Internet address http://www.nyse.com were not disrupted Monday. This came after a takedown was pledged as the stated objective of an unidentified pariy or parties claiming to be the Anonymous Hackers, who earlier this year successfully disrupted the public Web sites of credit card payments processors MasterCard and Visa.
That disruption came after MasterCard and Visa shut down payments to the WikiLeaks organization headed by Julian Assange. That came after WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of confidential documents about the conduct of U.S. operations in Iraq.
But NYSE.com stayed up and operational at 3:30 p.m. and after, even though the alleged hackers pledged a “day that shall never, ever be forgot.”
The action was purportedly being taken in sympathy with the three-week-old protest of growing income equality being staged by a group calling itself Occupy Wall Street that is based in park near the headquarters of the New York Stock Exchange.
But there was no disruption of the informational web site of the NYSE or the NYSE itself.
By the close of trading Monday, more than 3.4 billion shares of NYSE-listed stocks had changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange and other national markets.
Not that the NYSE escaped the Columbus weekend wholly unscathed. Its Mahwah data center, where actually trading operations take place, suffered a fire.
But exchange operations were not affected.
Here’s the NYSE’s notice on the fire:
On Sunday, there was an isolated electrical fire that was quickly extinguished within a single computer cabinet at our Mahwah data center. The incident, which resulted in no injuries, affected communications connectivity to 58 customers who have been notified that we are testing all systems and expect completely normal operations for Monday's market open. We are grateful for the quick and thorough response by the Mahwah Fire and Police Departments as well as our Mahwah data center staff.
And in fact, operations were normal on the first trading session of the week.
As were operation of the NYSE.com site, through the end of the session.
