Both the New York Stock Exchange and United Airlines are shut down, both giving cryptic explanations related to technology.
On Twitter, news organization are clueless, simply echoing the statements that there are tech problems for NYSE and automation problems for United Airlines.
Here's the official statement from the NYSE website:
"NYSE/NYSE MKT has temporarily suspended trading in all symbols. Additional information will follow as soon as possible."
And here's a tweet from United Airlines:
This is an odd, never before seen set of circumstances.
Could these two operations have been hacked?
The first response to my tweet raising the possibility of hacking:
@robkall Well.. the fallout from #HackingTeam vulns being published via adobe & windows over the weekend is malware in hands of unknowns.
Here is the Twitter profile for Hacking Team:
HackingTeam @hackingteamDeveloping effective, easy-to-use offensive technology to support the operations of the worldwide law enforcement and intelligence communities.
Milan, Italy hackingteam.com
Apparently, Hacking Team itself was hacked recently, exposing massive vulnerabilties throughout the world.
John McAfee reports in and IBTimes article,
Hacking Team data leak portends grim future of global cyberwar:
The hack of Hacking Team, on the surface, and according to the world's cybersecurity press, appears to be a uniquely monumental event that threatens to bring down a well-known name in the mass surveillance industry.
The known fact that the company created a backdoor to its own products, and the backdoor's details have now been published, renders all of those products useless and obsolete.
It additionally threatens the security integrity of all of the company's clients. Those backdoors could provide hackers with the identity of every covert agency's targets, and the dates, times, means and results of every investigation.
You can bet that prior to the release of the hacked information, every agency using these products had already been hacked. This bodes ill for law enforcement and covert agencies."
Here are a few tweets that give further background to the reference to #hackingteam
and
Update: 7/8 1:04 PM EST from NYSE:
(1 of 3) The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach.
Update: CNN tweeted at 12:36 PM EST:
Homeland Security Dept. says there's no sign of malicious activity at #NYSE or with earlier United Airlines outage. http://cnnmon.ie/1NOIshg
And of course, we believe everything that Homeland Security tells us.
Here's are some questions. Would an airline or stock exchange admit to being hacked? What would the market think of an airline or a stock exchange that could be hacked. How would trust in the safety and reliability be affected? Would papa Obama decide that such news would be too damaging to the market, to air travel? (I've changed the categorization of this article from news to Op-Ed.)
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
Godzilla_Govt"-@Godzilla_Govt
David Gilbert@daithaigilbert 4 hours agoNYSE@NYSE 35 minutes ago
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