Post by Armand Tanzarian on Oct 6, 2011 9:26:17 GMT -5
Actually as long as you are very liberal with the term "attack", Anon can take down the stock market very easily. The Dow would shut down, hence an attack is successful. Problem is it wouldn't have much impact beyond the day's trades.
All someone has to do is to design a program that automatically triggers options at a certain point. Hell, you can buy one if you have the money. A significant amount of trades are now done by such automatic robots that trigger selling or buying if a watched stock goes to a particular price. The Dow suffered a 10% drop in 5 minutes when such a trigger led to a spiraling series of trades between robots, so much trading had to be shut. All you need is to modify or infect a program to that again, and you have an instant attack.
But don't tell anyone I gave you this idea.
All someone has to do is to design a program that automatically triggers options at a certain point. Hell, you can buy one if you have the money. A significant amount of trades are now done by such automatic robots that trigger selling or buying if a watched stock goes to a particular price. The Dow suffered a 10% drop in 5 minutes when such a trigger led to a spiraling series of trades between robots, so much trading had to be shut. All you need is to modify or infect a program to that again, and you have an instant attack.
But don't tell anyone I gave you this idea.
