An image of NASDAQ trading wall
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — NASDAQ OMX Group (www.nasdaqomx.com), the company that owns the NASDAQ stock market system confirmed on Saturday that its network was repeatedly breached by hackers.
Though the trading platform was never compromised in any of the attacks, the hackers did manage to infiltrate a service that allows company leaders to securely share private information.
NASDAQ OMX Group said that hackers were targeting its application Directors Desk, a managed communication system for corporate boards.
The company also said that it did not disclose the attack to the public based on orders of the Department of Justice, which said it should “refrain from providing notice to… customers until, at the earliest, February 14, 2011 in order to facilitate the continuing investigation.”
However, when the Wall Street Journal broke the story on February 5, NASDAQ OMX along with authorities decided to inform the media about the attacks.
“Through our normal security monitoring systems we detected suspicious files on the US servers unrelated to our trading systems and determined that our web facing application Directors Desk was potentially affected,” NASDAQ OMX Group EVP of corporate strategy and CFO Adena Friedman said in a statement. “We immediately conducted an investigation, which included outside forensic firms and US federal law enforcement. The files were immediately removed and at this point there is no evidence that any Directors Desk customer information was accessed or acquired by hackers. Our trading platform architecture operates independently from our web-facing services like Directors Desk and at no point was any of NASDAQ OMX’s operated or serviced trading platforms compromised.”
NASDAQ OMX owns 22 exchanges which it controls from its main data centers in New York, Stockholm and London, as well as another 50 exchanges located around the globe.
Since 2009, Verizon has operated much of its data center operations, handling the day to day operations and infrastructure responsibilities of the facilities.
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