In solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent, Anonymous hacktivsts shut down the public websites for NASDAQ, BATS stock exchange and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE).
The financial websites were temporarily taken offline earlier this week in an action dubbed Operation Digital Tornado. According to reports, the websites were temporarily made unavailable to users on Monday and Tuesday of this week. NASDAQ confirmed the successful attacks Tuesday evening.
A hacking crew identified as LONGwave99 and associated with the international Internet collective known as Anonymous is credited with the successful action.
The Anonymous hacktivists used a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to disable the finaicial websites. A DDoS attack is an orchestrated attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Such an attack does no permanent damage; the website is not hacked, and no information is tampered with, lost, or stolen. Instead, the website is simply made unavailable to other web users for a short period of time.
A DDoS attack, if successful, is a short lived if embarrassing nuisance, and a temporary inconvenience for users of the website. The value of such attacks has always been symbolic - a means for Anonymous enthusiasts to flex their cyber muscle, and draw attention to causes they feel passionate about.
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