London Stock Exchange Was 'Under Major Cyberattack' During Linux Switch 98
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Computerworld UK:
"The London Stock Exchange's new open source trading system may have been hacked last year, according to a report. The alleged attack came as the LSE began the switch over to the Linux-based systems, according to the dates referred to in the Times newspaper. The continued threat of cyber attack has resulted in the LSE keeping a close dialogue with British security services, which this year branded cyber attacks as one of the biggest threats to the country. There were major problems on the exchange on 24 August, when stock prices of five large companies collapsed."
Internet Connected Exchanges?! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Vague site, no details. (Score:5, Interesting)
What I've heard is this. It's all hearsay, so is probably as factual as the FA.
The LSE is trying to (Stupidly) save face. They tried to go live and it was an absolute shit show, typical companies got about 20% compliance. There was no way they could roll forward, they had issues with firewalls, members had issues with routing and firewalls, trades weren't going through the system correctly for settlements, there was more bugs in member's code than ants in a nest. If they had said "We're going live anyway" there wouldn't have been a market on Monday morning. Aside from that, everyone goes into freeze for Christmas due to everyone taking time off, so it wouldn't have been sorted till at least after now, by which time, LSE would have lost so much business to the likes of NYSE (And potentially to Borsa Italiana, which is owned by the LSE) that it would be questionable whether they would still be in business by this stage.
They claimed previously that they were internally sabotaged, well, the running theory was that they just fucked up. To everyone involved that seems like a much more plausible option.