Subtle Cyber Attacks Could Tilt Global Economies 51
wiredmikey writes "A subtle, yet powerfully destructive force of electronic attacks may be working slowly and silently to disrupt elements of the world's market-based economies. Recent cyber-attacks on the European Emissions Trading Scheme shut down that exchange's carbon market just a few weeks ago. Along with the fear of lights-out DDoS attacks that has traditionally stalked electronic markets, and logically still does, new types of attacks by subtle manipulation could slowly turn electronic markets on their heads by corrupting their very legitimacy. What's worse? Attacking someone's borders, or slowly disrupting and degrading confidence in their entire national economic well-being?"
And what part of stock market is 'market' again ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Consult zerohedge for cyber/market spam nexus (Score:5, Interesting)
The majority of stock activity is exactly this electronic noise, it's the rule, not the exception. The whole equities market (and other ones) is a turbo-hyperactive instant messaging system of bid/ask channels and they are all basically crapflooded now at about 60-70% of daily trading volume. The "Carbon Market" is another huge scam handy for passthru moneylaundering & fraud operations. Unknown binaries have been lodged in key NASDAQ systems. The messaging "order flow" is arbitrarily frontrun (i.e. man in the middle message intercept).
The real question is what miserable slice of the activity actually represents rationally allocated capital, rather than this message crapflooding. My fave site for this topic http://zerohedge.com/ [zerohedge.com] consistently nails so many anomalies, flash crashes, order stacking rule loopholes (which bids are bumped off to 'dark pools' under less than optimal logic) etc.
It would be better if there was a 5ms 'quanta' for market prices, at least that would set a minimum time-to-live for price quotes. It becomes less 'rational' as the time horizon asymptotically approaches zero.