Hacker News Reader

Is this what an actual cyberattack / cyberwar looks like?

Imagine how much money is being lost right now as a result of this disruption. Somewhere hackers are popping champagne.

UAL stock took a $1 nosedive (hah) at 10am.

Find out who made money by shorting it, there's your list of suspects, or at least co-conspirators (if this turns out to be a hack).

Or people who use twitter and like to gamble.

Or bots who subscribe to Twitter feeds and open trades based on sentiment

In that case the suspects could be the ones buying it after it dropped $1, since it went up afterward.

As long as securities react to hacks, there will be a massive incentive to 1) hack, and 2) overstate the hack's significance. Furthermore, as bots become more sophisticated, confusing them becomes easier. If you know bots will short CompanyX when "CompanyX hacked" hits the headlines, then you have an unfair advantage just by being the first to know of the hack.

That's why I said "list of suspects" instead of "culprit".

Why wouldn't the stock drop more?

More likely real hackers (programmers), working for united, were trying to roll out to production and experienced an issue.

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