Some backstory from the article: "Last month, the LSE made the important step of allowing more IT personnel into its datacentre, expanding co-location beyond trading firms and to software firms – to install hosted systems and their own market data distribution platforms. It is not known if any of this raft of new companies entering the datacentre played a part in the outage."
The exchange needs ot come clean about what happened. There is too much speculation.
On the contrary, there's just not enough of the right kind of speculation ;-)
Gaius, I wonder if one vendor or trading firm was trying to cause trouble for another...
Ultimate insider trading, inside your rival's infrastructure...
I wonder how the contractor did this. If it was a physical attack (unplugged a bunch of cables), then it would mean that the LSE has a rather weak SPF vulnerable. If it was a software attack, it's probably even worse: it means that developers have way too much access to the production systems. In a startup, it's fine (necessary even) for devs to get access to production, but in a large financial institution, that's a huge no-no, both in terms of data protection issues and security.
HFT relies on colocation, which means, there's only a cage between different vendor's hardware.