Stock Exchange Wall Street Journal and United Airlines go down

9 Jul 2015 · 2 min

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In a Fox 25 News segment, anchor Elizabeth introduces a discussion about three major technical failures that occurred on the same day: the New York Stock Exchange halted trading, United Airlines grounded flights, and the Wall Street Journal website went offline. The segment features reporter Bob Ward interviewing cybersecurity specialist Robert Siciliano. Siciliano notes the rarity of three high‑profile entities experiencing outages simultaneously and raises the possibility of coordinated hacking, suggesting foreign governments, criminal groups, or hacktivist activists could be responsible. He also acknowledges that the incidents might be coincidental and awaits any claim of responsibility. Federal officials are quoted as saying there is no evidence the glitches are related, highlighting the uncertainty surrounding the cause.

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The feds are making sure to say that there is no reason to believe that these big technical glitches are related. So if it wasn't a hack attack, what was it? Our Bob Ward spoke with cyber experts to get some answers. Bob?
Elizabeth, we live in the digital age. Nearly everything we do depends on high-tech or the internet. That's why today I went to speak to a security expert to find out if all of these things today could have possibly been connected. The New York Stock Exchange grinding to a halt. All trade abruptly stopped for apparent technical issues. Earlier, United Airlines grounds all of its flights for something called a network connectivity issue. And on top of that, the Wall Street Journal's website shut down. In a world dependent on the internet, it is a troubling day.
Having 3 entities this— of this magnitude go offline for any period of time, uh, is cause for concern.
Hotspot Shield identity theft expert Robert Siciliano is closely watching these technical glitches and how they're impacting big business. He is concerned about the possibility that this may have been the work of hackers.
The fact that the Wall Street Journal went down, uh, means that more than likely somebody attacked them, but we don't know yet. But when United goes down and the stock exchange in the same day in a concentrated period of time It very well could mean that some foreign government or foreign entity or even local criminal hackers could possibly have had something to do with it.
The glitches all on the same day at about the same time could have been a massive coincidence. Siciliano is waiting to see if anyone claims responsibility.
There is certainly a great deal of hacktivism going on. These are hacker activists that basically want to make a statement, and when they make a statement, they're generally doing it to large entities.
Alright, so the New York Stock Exchange today said on Twitter that it believes that its problems today were in-house, not the work of any kind of security breach. Homeland Security said kind of the same thing, but our security expert that we interviewed today, he said it's really too early to say what exactly happened. Live at Logan, Bob Ward, Fox 25 News.