U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said technical problems reported on Wednesday by United Airlines and the New York Stock Exchange were apparently not related to “nefarious” activity.
“I have spoken to the CEO of United, Jeff Smisek, myself. It appears from what we know at this stage that the malfunctions at United and the stock exchange were not the result of any nefarious actor,” Johnson said during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
“We know less about the Wall Street Journal at this point, except that their system is in fact up again,” he added.
Earlier on Wednesday, United flights were grounded after a router issue degraded connectivity in the airline’s networks.
Just as United was bringing its systems back on-line, trading on the New York Stock Exchange came to a halt due to a technical problem and the Wall Street Journal’s website experienced errors.
Johnson also said that approximately 4.2 million people, including government employees and contractors, had been notified about the recent breaches of government personnel data, but investigators are still trying to determine the total number affected by the hacks.
He said compromised data included information from government security-clearance background investigations.
Johnson also called for a new national data breach reporting system to replace the current “patchwork” of state laws, as well as enhanced criminal penalties for hacking.
(Reporting by Lisa Lambert and Mark Hosenball; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
Computer glitch my eye. Do you think the NYSE is running on windows7 ?
I read elsewhere that a sell off had begun just prior to this “glitch”, and the bigger picture of China’s Trillion dollar losses yesterday, and the Greek saga makes it all too obvious.
Actor? Is this telling a truth? Remember…Sandy Hook?….government disaster actors….Katrina hurricane? Blatant…”in your face” lies people!
The “glitch” is that there are no buyers, there haven’t been any buyers for years. It’s all been propped up by the Federal Reserve through their trading computers at brokerages like Goldman Sachs. Now they are going to take this fake market down but why do they even need an excuse like a glitch or a terrorist or a hack? Why bother? They get away with whatever the hell they want to do anyway.