Were hackers able to take down the New York Stock Exchange website with a planned DDoS attack?
Last week, a faction of Anonymous threatened to take down the New York Stock Exchange website today at 3:30 EST today, October 10 via a video message. As the planned attack time came and went today, the NYSE site remains online.
According to Richard Adamonis, the Senior Vice President of Communications at NYSE, the site was not offline for any period of time. “I am unaware of any attacks on the site” he said in a brief phone interview with the Daily Dot.
The planned attack on the NYSE site by Anonymous, code named and hashtagged on Twitter as #InvadeWallStreet was widely covered by media outlets, and frowned upon by other members of Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street protesters.
In the days leading up to the planned attack, another video was created and uploaded on October 8t by Anonymous. The video stated the attack on October 10 is still happening, and goes on to mention on October 8, the site did go down for 30 minutes (a claim Adamonis denies).
The video goes on to address whether or not the #invadewallstreet operation is a real operation by Anonymous, and not one created by the US Government. YouTube and Twitter chatter claims #invadewallstreet was created by the government to disrupt the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Other tweets by AnonOps regarding #invadewallstreet claimed the operation had been compromised by an agent named “hypotenuse.” The Anonymous Global Network Facebook page also stated something similar, writing the agent “hypotenuse” had infiltrated the AnonOps IRC channel.
A popular blog post on #invadewallstreet, echoing earlier speculation on Federal agent involvement, is currently being passed around among Anonymous twitter users.
Other Anons maintain there never was any threat to the NYSE site, like AnonD3c3p7ic0n who tweeted “only the media …desperately believed this was real.”
“Is it too early for me to say ‘I told you so?’ I just hope to high Heaven none of you bloody fools get arrested for this!” tweeted AnonNep minutes before publication.
Photo credit Brian Glanz