Robert Siciliano, an identity-theft expert, discusses simultaneous outages at United Airlines and the New York Stock Exchange on the same day in July 2015. The conversation weighs whether technical failures or cyberattacks caused the blackouts and explores the economic fallout from major digital-system failures.
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Randy, thank you. Security analyst Robert Siciliano joining us now on the phone. He's an identity theft expert with Hotspot Shield. Robert, United Airlines shut down for a couple of hours. New York Stock Exchange still not up and running. We're assuming this is a coincidence. What's your take?
We hope it's a coincidence. No one has, to my knowledge, claimed any responsibility for United Airlines being down or the stock exchange being down. So at this point, if it is the agenda of some type of a criminal organization, they haven't come forward. These things happen. We know technology in and of itself isn't perfect. Nothing is. And that, um, there are numerous reasons why this could have occurred. And so we're just hoping that when they say glitch, it actually is in fact a glitch.
When we talk about this idea of a glitch, being a computer expert, I know that a spokesperson for the New York Stock Exchange admitted that they actually had some problems problems even before the opening but went ahead anyway and then realized, ooh, major problem, and then chose to shut it all down?
Well, those problems that happened, uh, in the early on, uh, they could have just simply been, uh, you know, servers that, um, uh, weren't properly updated. They could have had power issues. There could have been some type of a virus involved that could have slowed the network down. And a virus doesn't necessarily mean that the data is being manipulated. It could just mean that that virus, you know, being a bug of sorts that is causing problems, malicious of some sort, but not necessarily a data breach of any kind.
Robert, what kind of questions would you be asking if you were looking into this yourself?
Well, certainly I'd want to have contact with any forensics analysts that are looking into the system. To determine where it all began, what the root of the problem might be, and if they in any way, shape, or form feel that this was an attack of some kind. You know, when it's all said and done, our money today is essentially, you know, ones and zeros, meaning that it's all digital. You know, while we certainly handle paper cash on occasion, there are, you know, trillions of dollars that are simply ones and zeros that are exchanged on a daily basis. And for that to evaporate would be a significant issue in our economy and would cause chaos all over the country and potentially the world.
Treasury Department, of course, monitoring this situation. Department of Homeland Security saying there was no cyberattack, this was all technical. But talk to me about how unprecedented this is. There were only 7 closures since the founding of the predecessor exchange, and that was back in 1817.
Yeah, the fact that, um, you know, they're speaking to computer glitches and that we've dealt with so many data breaches and so many what's called distributed denial of service attacks. And those are attacks that basically flood a computer network and overwhelm it and essentially shutting it down. Because there has been so much talk of this and so much, you know, activity revolving around it, definitely it causes concern. All that being said, I think that it's important that everybody just kind of sit back step back, take a deep breath, and we look into the issues at hand. And going forward, hoping that, you know, they have redundant systems in place that prevent this in the future.
You bet. Robert Siciliano, thank you for your expertise.
