NEW YORK—Anonymous, the hacker group, reportedly targeted NYSE.com, the home page of the New York Stock Exchange, on Monday afternoon.
The website was unavailable briefly, for about one minute, at around 3:35 p.m. Eastern time, according to a Chicago Tribune report.
Last week, the hacker group announced via a posting on YouTube that it would stage a massive DDoS—distributed denial of service—attack against NYSE, in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which have been occurring over the past few weeks at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, N.Y.
A DDoS attack seeks to direct an inordinate amount of traffic to a website, temporarily overloading its servers. The hacker group Anonymous previously orchestrated similar attacks on Visa.com and Mastercard.com last year for their opposition to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks.
Some Internet monitoring websites did not report any outages for NYSE.com, while data from downforeveryoneorjustme.com confirmed that NYSE.com was down briefly. All sources, which did confirm the outage also reported that the outage, if occurred, was brief, and no trading activity was affected.
NYSE, in a statement, said that it reviewed Web traffic shortly after 3:30 p.m. and did not detect any service disruption.
The hacker group, as well as supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement discussed the action on Twitter earlier in the day, with as many people against the DDoS attack as those who advocated it. Some argued that the attack could bring bad press to the protesters, who so far have remained peaceful.
Nevertheless, no trading was disrupted. U.S. stocks rallied, with all major indices ending Monday moderately higher. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the day 330 points higher, or 3 percent. The S&P 500 Index also rose, by 3.4 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite Index gained 3.5 percent.
