Traces of hacking on the Nasdaq’s servers

Nasdaq OMX, technical operator of the Nasdaq stock exchange in the United States, indicates that they have found traces of an intrusion in their servers. The stock market listings were not compromised.

The manipulation of stock prices by hackers who manage to infiltrate stock market’s computer systems is a frequent theme in police movies, with such an event surely being capable of destabilizing an economy… This is also a dream for people with bad intentions.

Without getting to this point, Nasdaq OMX, the company responsible for managing the American stock market, indicated that they found suspect files on some of their servers, leading to them to believe that hackers managed to gain access.


Stock prices not compromised
To reassure the market, the company confirms that the system responsible for managing the stock prices was never breeched, and an investigation has now been opened by the FBI and the American Department of Justice. Such actions could have a potential threat on the economy, but various market watchers state that there is a wall between the infrastructure accessible from the Web and the stock market quoting system.

Nasdaq OMX suggest that a Web application hosted on one of their servers, Directors Desk, which allows for the sharing of certain information could have been used as the entry point. The suspect files were immediately removed but the information stored within the application doesn’t appear to have been exploited by the hackers.

The intrusion seems to have had the objective of installing malware which could then be used as an entry point to recover information stored on the servers. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the first source to report the attack, it is suspected that the origins of the attack are in Russia, although this hasn’t been confirmed.