NYSE might have been hit by hackers

ONLINE HACKTIVISTS Anonymous could have hit the New York Stock Exchange computer systems yesterday.

The NYSE.com web site went down briefly yesterday afternoon and as soon as it happened fingers began pointing at the hackers, some of whom are camping out in the New York financial district as part of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

The group, or at least one part of it, had called for attacks on the stock exchange financial systems, but the idea seemed to divide the group, not least because it was targeted for Columbus Day, a national holiday in the US.

The attack had been scheduled for 3.30pm yesterday, and indeed the NYSE began to slow down at that time. However, it was only lagging for a very short time and recovered in a matter of minutes.

A web monitoring firm called Alertsite noticed the outage, and its patent company Smartbear tweeted, "Anonymous takes down http://NYSE.com website for a minute. #AlertSite tracked outage".

According to CNN the NYSE has denied the outage, saying that it saw nothing on its own systems. CNN adds that the attack likely used a "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attack.

The suggestion to hack the NYSE had earlier caused a split in Anonymous, with active parties within the group disagreeing over whether it was right to attack the systems in support of the Invade Wall Street faction.

Some suggested that the Invade Wall Street campaign was designed by trolls or psyops looking to divert attention and support away from the peaceful Occupy Wall Street protests.

"We'll say it clear: We won't hack Wall Street. Please FBI invest the resources in better things!", said the Anonops account when the plans first came up. "Don't get roped in by those who want 2 see #occupywallstreet fail."

Yesterday afternoon the groups were divided on Twitter again, with some accounts celebrating the downtime and others criticising it.

"#Anonymous takes down #NYSE for 1 minute... with just 150 anons? Not bad at all! Carry on!", said Anon_central, while the AnonymousIRC Tweeter added, "*harrumph* 'A representative from the New York Stock Exchange declined to comment.' We, for many, decline, too." µ