Tag: United Airlines

United Airlines, NY Stock Exchange, Wall Street Journal all suffer ‘glitches’

After reports of major delays in airports due to a computer issue affecting United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange and the Wall Street Journal all suffered from cyber problems. All at this point have been explained away by the companies themselves as technical problems, not cyber breaches.

Then there’s this, tweeted by the Anonymous newsfeed, @YourAnonNews, just before midnight on July 7:

This looks at first like a subtle nod at some kind of action to come, something YourAnonNews might do, but some who learned of YAN’s tweet after the tech issues struck had a different take:

Ms. Lopez’s take doesn’t feel like a stretch, either.

Writing about crime and cyber crime over time I came to realize that a vivid imagination can serve writing about true events by sparking lively prose, but it can be troublesome once you start trying to sleuth or guess about whatever you’re covering. The little dramatist in my head tries to take over and turn real world events into a suspense novel. And sometimes the real world is mundane. There are coincidences. Machines fuck up. People write faulty software.

I’m trying to blog more, just about things that interest me–news, crime, cyber crime, unsolved mysteries, cold cases, missing people, history, fitness–but as I do I become aware of the way some of my thinking has changed since I did it every day as a job and for myself. One of those changes is accepting that sometimes there really isn’t any drama there (wherever there is at that time). At least no more drama than the usual theater of things falling apart. As they do. [WSJ]

It’s probably nothing: the United Airlines Computer Glitch

Computers fail. Entire server farms full of computers fail. Nothing electronic is failsafe. So, the full stop that grounded United Airlines on the morning of July 8, 2015 might simply be a tech problem. Such issues have occurred before and will again.

It is worth it to note, however, that United Airlines has offered rewards to hackers who find security flaws in the company’s systems. Those rewards could be considered a challenge, or they could be considered by some an implied admission that there are flaws to find.

And as Sophos’s Naked Security blog also notes, United has had issues in the past with data insecurity.

So far United has only acknowledged vague computer issues. And sure, that’s probably what it is. In case it’s not, the information may show up in searches like this, first. [NBC]