The news today is deeply disturbing regarding United Airlines and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) having major computer system shutdowns due to “technical glitches.”
Coincidence or cyberterrorism? This matches patterns of escalation from malware in our infrastructure, attacks on banks, hacks on companies like Anthem Blue Cross, our government under siege with the theft of records. It only makes sense that the hacks continue to reach new levels in their attempts at theft and undermining the American economy.
First thing this morning United Airlines reported that their systems were hung, taking almost two hours to recover. This “glitch” affected over 3,500 flights and hundreds of thousands of travelers throughout the air travel system
Then the NYSE halted all trading at 11:32am EDT as a major technical issue crashed the trading systems. The highly redundant and scalable systems implemented for trading don’t just crash from a glitch.
These both have the hallmarks of attacks, probing for weaknesses, resulting in tests to determine the capability to damage systems and our economy.
World War III might not be found with weapons in the sense that you know them. It is very possible a war could happen with just electrons, destroying our way of life.
I get more into CyberSecurity in chapter nine of my new book Liars & Whores: How Big Government and Big Business Are Working to Save Their Own Assets, Not Yours
UPDATE 11:16am PDT 7/8/2015 – The Los Angeles Times is reporting that NYSE officials are claiming there was no attack, “internal technical issue.” While entirely possible, it is actually more plausible that the highly redundant, highly available systems that they use were actually shutdown the moment a breach was monitored and the shutdown was a precautionary measure to isolate the incident before it could cause any major damage or theft. The hardware and software architecture used in the NYSE trading systems have multiple redundancies built-in, so an internal technical issue is nearly impossible.
