What went wrong? Computer glitches, reportedly.
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But Washington immediately turned to the security question. If you really want to scare yourself, check out Paul Sparrow’s Hackmageddon site, which collects timelines of all reported cyberattacks, month by month.
Wednesday’s events, however, could not have been avoided even if an information-sharing law was in place. The head of Homeland Security spoke with both United and the NYSE, and attested that the glitches were “not the result of any nefarious actor”.
And that’s the rub for lawmakers.
At this point, however, they seem to have been coincidental.
The cause of the problem “likely had to do with an upgrade, but that is premature, and it’s something that will come about as part of a full analysis of the situation”, Thomas Farley, the NYSE’s president, said in a Bloomberg TV interview.
“Our life, our business, our playtime, our education have become very much subordinated to the whims of machines”.
This technological daisy chain will increase the complexity of the systems and raise the risks of massive breakdowns, either through an inadvertent glitch or a malicious attack. “We fixed the router issue, which is enabling us to restore normal functions”, a spokeswoman said.
The four-hour stoppage of trading on the New York Stock Exchange July 8 and problems earlier in the day at United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal brought new focus to growing dependence businesses and consumers have on technology and the problems that can arise when that technology goes awry. United is the largest airline in the U.S.
The halt occurred at about 11:30 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday.
“The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach”, NYSE tweeted out about an hour after the halt.
The NYSE’s technical problem hasn’t stopped trading of NYSE-listed shares, which continue to change hands on other exchanges. Trading resumed after about three and a half hours.
“What it says is: there are still things we need to ideal”, said Sri Sridharan of the Florida Center for Cybersecurity at USF.
“This was not the work of hackers at all”, that person said.
“From everything I can gather in a short period of time, there’s nobody in the intelligence community that believes a cyberattack had anything to do with it”, Burr told National Journal.
These problems aren’t similar.
WSJ.com was back up by Wednesday afternoon, albeit with a bare-bones website and basic formatting.
“A legislative approach could not have prevented what happened today, knowing what I know”, Toregas said, but a loose framework that encourages cooperation between the government and the tech sector-a model of coordination like the one Obama pitched during a February visit to Stanford University-would be a valuable step.
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He said that as he stood in front of a real-time chart that shows only one percent of worldwide hacker activity.
