

London Stock Exchange contractor ‘suspended’ after huge IT hit - DMPenfold2008
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3247347/london-stock-exchange-contractor-suspended-after-massive-network-hit/

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jdp23
Some backstory from the article: "Last month, the LSE made the important step
of allowing more IT personnel into its datacentre, expanding co-location
beyond trading firms and to software firms – to install hosted systems and
their own market data distribution platforms. It is not known if any of this
raft of new companies entering the datacentre played a part in the outage."

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Powerscroft
The exchange needs ot come clean about what happened. There is too much
speculation.

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gaius
On the contrary, there's just not enough of the right kind of speculation ;-)

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DMPenfold2008
Gaius, I wonder if one vendor or trading firm was trying to cause trouble for
another...

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gaius
Ultimate insider trading, inside your rival's infrastructure...

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swombat
I wonder how the contractor did this. If it was a physical attack (unplugged a
bunch of cables), then it would mean that the LSE has a rather weak SPF
vulnerable. If it was a software attack, it's probably even worse: it means
that developers have way too much access to the production systems. In a
startup, it's fine (necessary even) for devs to get access to production, but
in a large financial institution, that's a huge no-no, both in terms of data
protection issues and security.

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gaius
HFT relies on colocation, which means, there's only a cage between different
vendor's hardware.

