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Cyber Attack For United, NYSE, WSJ?
On Wednesday, United Airlines grounded all flights due to a “technical glitch.” Then the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading because of a “technical issue.” Next, the Wall St. Journal website shut down — also due to a “technical problem.” Was this all just a strange coincidence or a calculated cyber attack?
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According to United Airlines, a system failure grounded all flights across the country for several hours, leaving travelers frustrated and stranded. United called it a “network connectivity issue” and blamed it on a router problem.
After being forced to suspend all trading, the New York Stock Exchange issued the following statement:
“We’re currently experiencing a technical issue that we’re working to resolve as quickly as possible. We will be providing further updates as soon as we can, and are doing our utmost to produce a swift resolution, communicate thoroughly and transparently, and ensure a timely and orderly market re-open.”
The homepage for The Wall St. Journal displayed a mysterious 504 outage on Wednesday, only hours after United Airlines grounded all its flights and mere minutes after trading was halted on the New York Stock Exchange.
Was this all a coincidence or a possible cyber attack?
During a US Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) confronted FBI Director James Comey about the strange storm of tech failures, questioning the possibility of a cyber attack.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Mikulski said. “Is the FBI investigating these as breaches?”
“We’re not big believers in coincidence either,” Comey said, before insisting the tech issues were all a coincidence. “We’ve been in contact with all three companies to see what’s going on. We don’t see a connection to a cyber breach or cyber attack.”
Cyber security expert Cedric Leighton, CEO of Cedric Leighton Associates dd not agree with Comey’s conclusion.
“I’m very suspicious,” Leighton said of United, NYSE and The WSJ all going down within hours of each other. “My suspicion is this was a test run by a cyber-hacker or potentially from a nation state.”
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Granted, 3 major US entities involving travel, trade and news all going down on the same day could have very well been a coincidence. However, it also could have been a carefully calculated cyber attack. The fact FBI Director Comey was quick to dismiss the cyber attack theory could mean he either doesn’t know for sure, or he doesn’t want the American public to know.
Perhaps this was an actual cyber attack against the US. Perhaps it was a trial run for a future and much larger cyber attack to come. Or, perhaps it was just a strange and wild coincidence causing major chaos all in the same day.
What do you think?
When I heard about this yesterday the first thing I thought was somebody was doing this on purpose. Now the FBI director is saying it wasn't a hacker but what is he supposed to say? He could cause public panic if he admitted three big American companies got hacked that easy. I don't know if we're getting the whole truth but my gut tells me this was cyberattack.