We all laughed and pointed our fingers at Chuck Norris, when he floated the idea earlier this week that the current crisis on Wall Street is the result of "economic terrorism." Some of the nation's counterintelligence officials aren't smiling, however.
No, they don't believe Chuck's thesis about some mysterious "manipulation of the marketplace" that's causing us all to lose our life savings. But some spooks are concerned that hackers could send already-frazzled "stock markets into one more panicked frenzy, by covertly manipulating data and spreading false information," Shane Harris reports in the latest edition of National Journal.
As evidence, spooks point to the recent hits to Apple's and United Airlines' stock prices, based on misinformation. And they cite the example of Jerome Kerviel, a hacker and trader at the French financial firm Societe
Generale. In January, Kerviel caused a worldwide financial panic, basically by himself.
First, he made all kinds of bogus, risky trades. Then Kerviel hacked his employer's networks, to cover up his tracks. He "disabled an automatic-alert mechanism that should have flagged his reckless transactions. And he stole passwords that gave him access to accounting records, which he falsified to cover his tracks. He even constructed fake e-mails about fictitious trades to make his activities seem real."
The bank's losses "totaled more than $7 billion." But, more importantly, it started a stampede in the futures market, and a dip in the world's stock markets. It got so bad that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben
Bernanke had to make an emergency cut of the interest rate that the Fed charges banks for overnight loans.
Last month, hackers in another case were sentenced to two years in prison for rigging stock prices. Is the intel officers' worry -- that a Kerviel-on-steroids could trigger an even wider panic -- legit? Well, these spooks are professional worrywarts. They're paid to come up with nightmare scenarios -- and think of ways to counter it. Hell, some of
'em are even biting their nails about terrorists in World of Warcraft. But this seems a little more legit. Even if it does sound vaguely reminiscent of a Chuck Norris freak-out.
[Photo: MSNBC]
