[ISN] Was Cyberwarfare the Cause of the Flash Crash?

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:38:28 -0500 (CDT)
http://www.advancedtrading.com/blog/archives/2010/08/was_cyberwarefa.html

By Ivy Schmerken
Advanced Trading
Aug 24, 2010 

The clues to the causes of the mysterious May 6 flash crash are 
evidently buried in the trading data. Yesterday the New York Times 
reported that a small, obscure data analysis company, Nanex, located 
outside of Chicago, has discovered strange patterns in the stock trading 
data, which it calls crop circles. [See the NYT story: “Ominously, Flash 
Crass Still Baffles”.

Ever since the market inexplicably plunged 600 points that day and 
recovered within minutes, Nanex, a company headed by CEO Eric Hundsader, 
a former developer of real-time trading systems, has been examining 
trading charts and publishing flash crash analysis. Nanex has reportedly 
attracted Wall Street’s interest in the charts by giving them intriguing 
names like Continental Crust, Broke Highway and Twilight,” the NY Times 
noted.

The bizarre patterns are giving rise to a theory that high –speed 
traders overloaded the exchanges as part of a conspiracy to slow down 
the exchanges and outsmart other investors.

One theory is that high-speed traders bombarded the exchanges with a 
fusillade of buy and sell orders that were never meant to be executed. 
They were simply trying to outwit each others’ computers and clog up the 
exchanges so that other investors couldn’t execute.

[...]


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Received on Tue Aug 24 2010 - 22:38:28 PDT

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