Image: bfishadow/Flickr (Creative Commons)
A online hacktivist group has taken down the website of the NASDAQ stock exchange – and at the time of writing, the site remains down. However, the group has said that their servers were not hacked and that trading systems were not affected.
“The website wasn’t hacked, nobody got any information. What they did was try to block access for our users,” a spokesperson told Reuters. “We experienced intermittent service disruptions on our corporate website and we are working to resolve the issues.”
This isn’t the first time the NASDAQ had security issues, with hackers successfully installing malicious software in 2010 that allowed them to spy on directors of publicly held companies because of lax security practices. That story was broken by Reuters last year.
Russia Today is claiming that a group known as L0NGwave99 is responsible for the attack, quoting from an operative, “This DDoS Operation over NASDAQ is done in support of the great and rooted 99% movement, whom the L0NGwave99 Group has decided to give a present.” It is likely, but not confirmed to, be aligned with Anonymous.