Chinese Retaliate Against West by Hacking NYSE & United Airlines

July 9, 2015 Geopolitics101 9 Comments

The West has now put online a fully automated AI-based Technocratic Dictatorship that may have exploited the inherent vulnerability of the Chinese Stock Exchange very recently, resulting to at least $3.5 trillion of lost stock market value.

Despite of this, the BRICS Summit in Russia successfully launched the BRICS World Bank with $100 billion of seed money for funding infrastructure projects of its members and other customers, and in its end goal of instituting a parallel financial system.
The China state’s intervention to mitigate the massive attacks on the Chinese Stock Market is not working:

“So far, the government’s moves have had little impact. Since peaking on June 12, the Shanghai Composite Index has fallen almost 32 percent, dropping more than 5 percent on some days. The selling pressure in China has been so severe that on July 8, about 1,300 companies halted trading in their stocks on mainland exchanges, freezing $2.6 trillion worth of shares, or 40 percent of the stock market capitalization. On July 7, Hong Kong followed the mainland exchanges into bear market territory.

The stock market rout, the worst mainland market slump since 1992, has been an embarrassment to Xi and Premier Li Keqiang, who have vowed to push through more than 300 reforms aimed at reducing state intervention and letting market forces play a bigger role in China’s $10 trillion economy.”

Now, the question is: Would China just take this Soros-like attack in Asian stock markets lying down or will it retaliate?
Here’s some Norse live snapshots of China Cyber Corp attacking particular system nodes in the US with some assistance from Russia, Singapore and parts of Europe:

Click here for a live view.

While the nature of most of these attacks are “unknown”, there are attacks on the databases themselves which are considered far more catastrophic than DDOS.
Here’s the snapshot of database attacks:
Just click on all images above for a larger view.
Just a few hours ago, the United Airlines resorted to manual issuance of boarding tickets only to cancel hundreds of scheduled flights and delayed not just 800 but at least 3,500 flights globally due to a “technical glitch”.

The worldwide groundstop had impacted about 3,500 flights, the airline said, apologizing to customers “for any inconvenience.”

CNBC

Those who are familiar with computer systems know that glitches don’t just happen, they are caused. Critical systems have redundancies, and when such systems can’t go back online within the first five minutes or so, it’s not too farfetched to say that they are under persistent attack.
And it’s not just the United Airlines that’s been under persistent attack but the New York Stock Exchange and Jew York Times, too. All targets suffered from “technical glitches” for at least three hours. Coincidence?
With what is happening in China’s Stock Market for the last few days, we don’t think so. The attack on NYSE is already a give-away.
Rick2012 has shared us a link to an article featuring a message from Anonymous. This shows that the Chinese and the Reformist Alliance, in general, have some form of link with the Anons as had been rumored a while back. The timestamp below suggests its coming from Asia.

Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street…. we can only hope.

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) July 8, 2015

E-pocalypse now: Airline, stock exchange hit by computer glitches

Published time: July 08, 2015 23:56

United Airlines was writing boarding passes by hand before stopping all flights for three hours. Then the New York Stock Exchange halted all trades, citing a mysterious “technical glitch.” It wasn’t a cyberattack, US officials said – but what was it?
The airline blamed its woes on a problem with a router. After first trying a low-tech fix, writing the boarding passes by hand, United grounded its entire fleet around 8 a.m. Eastern Time. By the time the computers were back up and the order was lifted, almost two hours later, some 800 flights had been delayed, and a total of 59 flights by United and its regional partners were canceled.
“An issue with a [computer] router degraded network connectivity for various applications, causing this morning’s operational disruption,” United said in a statement. “We fixed the router issue, which is enabling us to restore normal functions.”
By 11:30, however, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) had called a halt to all trades and said all open orders would be canceled. Though trade continued on other exchanges, rampant speculation about the nature and cause of the problem spread through the social media like wildfire.

First @united grounds their planes, then @NYSE halts trading…is this real life or a viral marketing campaign for #MrRobot

— Albert Antiquera (@albertantiquera) July 8, 2015

An hour into the shutdown, NYSE issued a statement saying the problem was an “internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach.” FBI and Homeland Security issued statements to that effect as well.
Then the Wall Street Journal’s website went down.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to take a United flight to the NYSE for a story on http://t.co/V0bk9s9ZgC

— Mark Gongloff (@markgongloff) July 8, 2015

Though the Journal was able to re-establish the page by noon, the cause of the problem remained a mystery.
Meanwhile, the NYSE reopened around 3:15 p.m., only to close at its normal time 45 minutes later. According to one trader, who spoke to the New York Times on condition of anonymity, the problem was due to a software update that was rolled out before the markets opened Wednesday morning.
That did not stop the internet from recalling a subplot of the 2012 Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” when a terrorist named Bane held the “Gotham” stock exchange hostage.

Blame it on Bane: The Internet reacts to the NYSE’s halt http://t.co/BwEuiYWmlB

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 8, 2015

One cybersecurity company said its systems were showing an increase in attacks on a St. Louis hub, reportedly home to NYSE servers.

http://t.co/qIKrMG6TZL norse corp showing alot of attacks in st.louis which happens to be the location of the cybercon NYSE data center

— FxMacro (@fxmacro) July 8, 2015

Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida) tweeted that the outages at United, NYSE and WSJ gave “appearance of an attack,” and claimed this was a reminder for Congress to pass a cybersecurity bill he sponsored.

Three major computer malfunctions on same day give appearance of an attack, serve as reminder Congress must pass a cybersecurity bill

— Bill Nelson (@SenBillNelson) July 8, 2015

Many pointed to a Tuesday evening tweet, reportedly from the hacktivist group Anonymous, hoping that Wednesday would be a “bad day for Wall Street”:

Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street…. we can only hope.

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) July 8, 2015

The original explanation about unconnected, spontaneous problems seemed to prevail in the end, as normal operations were restored. While preferable to a cyberattack, the idea that air travel and stock trading could be crippled by faulty routers and bad software updates was still worrisome.
https://twitter.com/meganmurp/status/618824402503921664

Federal law enforcement officials are already citing fears of terrorism in a bid to subvert commercial encryption. Hackers have already compromised the White House, State Department and Office of Personnel Management computer systems.
This past weekend, the Italian-based spyware purveyor Hacking Team, which reportedly worked with several US government agencies, was itself hacked, and the company’s secrets leaked via Twitter.
With every aspect of life and business becoming increasingly dependent on computer networks, and those networks in turn being targeted by both governments and hackers, it seems like hardware and software glitches are the least of everyone’s problems – even if they can literally cause the world to “go dark.”
RT
Are they attacking China so they could mock its meteoric rise to economic power?
“China’s escalating intervention in its collapsing stock market — after months of quiescence while equities surged — is tarnishing policy makers’ efforts to establish the yuan as an official reserve currency.”
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Whatever the case, the BRICS are moving forward with their alternative development bank, use its own sovereign currencies for members’ forex exchange and may be approving infrastructure loans soon…

“I have not applied my mind as to what effect it will have on other currencies,” Kamath told RT. “But as far as our local currencies are concerned, our own countries are concerned, that will substantially reduce any exchange risk.”

“I think clearly setting up of this bank is also a signal that developing countries are now able to stand on their feet in their own way and set up their own institutions,” Kamath added. “And we are really looking at expanding the membership base in the future.”

The West could only respond with more saber rattling…