Such attacks have become common in recent times, and enjoy wide public sympathy due to the visible economic inequities and widening economic gulf between the rich and the poor that has put the middle-class with its back up against the wall. The pent up frustrations have to vent, and in the case of intellectuals empowered with computer skills, it is taking the shape of symbolic acts of protest through cyber-attacks on internet services of state-owned and other large organizations.
On Tuesday, as reported by Reuters, “Websites of exchange operators Nasdaq and BATS have been attacked by hackers over the last 24 hours, causing ongoing disruptions for those trying to use the sites.”
Throughout Tuesday afternoon, only the banner at top of the NASDAQ web page was visible, but the rest of the site failed to load for users. The NASDAQ OMX Group spokesman confirmed that the services were under a DDoS attack by hackers, similar in nature suffered by the CIA and Alabama Government websites a few days back.
NASDAQ spokesman Joseph Christinat confirmed that “The website wasn’t hacked, nobody got any information. What they did was try to block access for our users.”
Following the incident, a video posted on the YouTube, allegedly from the hacker group Anonymous claimed that the NYSE website would be “erased from the internet” to express solidarity with “Occupy Wall Street” movement in Lower Manhattan.
A BATS spokesperson also admitted that their company was affected by a DDoS attack, but confirmed, “Our trading systems were not affected and there were no exchange customer disruptions associated with the incident.”
DDoS attacks tantamount to denial of services as a symbolic act of protest without any attempt to mine data or infect systems with viruses or create irreparable damage. Of late DDoS had become one of the prime methods used by internet activists to call social boycott of targeted services.
DDOS or denial of service is not actually hacking as some reports lead people to believe it merely throws so many requests at a server as to effectively make the server unable to accept any connection requests preventing information from being transferred,therefore it is not hacking in the true sense although it has caused losses of many millions as was the case in Betfair.com in 3 days it lost over 10 million through not being able to get a TCP connection on its servers and effectively making them change server strategy to using a java back-end,10 years ago the same was done to Steve Gibson at GRC by a 14 yr old and many others have been attacked by bot nets in the same way since,as to the latest legislation with regards ISP`s monitoring users for sopa,pipa and soon to be CYBER for the Americans NSA cyber division based out of Fort Meades new centre whereby troops and black bag operations on individuals in foreign countries are to be made all that can be said is Fascism will be fought if not on the beaches then from an armchair with a laptop and piracy in China,Russia and Asia will not be abated in the slightest by the tactics the Americans and others seek to employ but by the industry making deals to legitimise music,film downloads using a percentage of what people already pay for in bandwidth usage from their ISP`s.
Libertarian anarchist really what’s the definition of anarchy. If you’re gonna right bias media at least do it right
Just wanted to point out that insisting the only other option besides capitalism is Chinese Communism is a logical fallacy called a “false dilemma” where you present an either/or situation with only two possibilities when their are in actuality many more exist. While it does not affirm that this article is bogus, it brings it into serious doubt.
Canada is under attack! Research Bill C-30. Canada calls on the International Community to help withstand this vicious attack.
“God keep out land, glorious and free
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee!”
Libertarian =! Anarchist. Do some research.
So they’re pent up frustrations instead of legitimate grievances?
Expect them
sigh….. WTF was the point of this??? Are they jealous that some pople make more money then their whole family combined?
“Nothing but the truth”
That’s rich…
This is a LAW website.
So much for unbiased reporting.
“hey, its not illegal. what we do”.