All trading on the New York Stock Exchange resumed Wednesday after being halted for nearly four hours for unknown internal technical reasons.
Top U.S. law enforcement and security officials said they didn't see a link between the outages at the New York Stock Exchange and the temporary grounding of United Airlines flights and the temporary malfunction of the Wall Street Journal website.
"We do not see any indication of a cyber breach or a cyber attack,'' FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence committee.
US Expands Cybersecurity Protection
As officials and cybersecurity experts scrambled Wednesday to find out the causes of the interruptions, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said his department is aggressively accelerating cybersecurity protective layers.
The coincidence of the three glitches demonstrated that the nation’s critical infrastructure is equally vulnerable to system’s failures as well as hacking attacks.
Speaking at an event at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said protecting the nation from cyberattacks is a complex job.
“There is no one “silver bullet” for cybersecurity. The key is to install multiple layers of protection to best secure our networks,” said Johnson.
According to Johnson, the three-layered cybersecurity system called EINSTEIN is steadily expanding its protection of cyberspace borders of federal government’s civilian departments and agencies.
EINSTEIN 1 observes and records all activity when someone enters or exits an agency’s network. EINSTEIN 2 detects such activities by known adversaries, while EINSTEIN 3 Accelerated, also known as E3A, is placed with the Internet Service Providers where it identifies and blocks malicious traffic.
Another program called CDM will help civilian agencies identify and fix problems.
“Once fully deployed, CDM will monitor agency networks internally for vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors that have breached the perimeter,” said Johnson.
Johnson said that he also ordered agencies to fix their own vulnerabilities and share cybersecurity threat indicators among themselves and with the private sector through an automated system that will be initiated in October.
The national security chief also called on Congress to ensure adequate legal and financial resources for cybersecurity initiatives.
