Yet another cyber attack caused a major web site to close down its operations for a number of hours this week. Reuters reported that the official web site of the NASDAQ stock market was hit by some kind of denial of service attack along with the www.nasdaqtrader.com web site. The sites were both back in operation today.
A spokesperson for NASDAQ said that the web sites got hit with the DOS attack starting late on Monday but the origins of the attack were not known. The actual trading of shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange was not affected by this DOS attack.
The report also claims that the official web site for the BATS stock market, the third largest in the US (behind NYSE and NASDAQ) also got hit with a DOS attack this week. The web site is now back up and as with the NASDAQ incident, trading on that stock exchange was not affected.
So far no group has come forward to claim responsibility for this newest attempt to shut down major web sites. The group Anonymous has claimed responsibility for a number of web site attacks in the past few weeks, including most recently the brief shut down of the CIA"s official web site.