Quantum Dawn 2: Wall Street Under Siege

A first-year analyst at BofA is pulling an all-nighter. He's on his second Snickers bar and his third Monster Lo-Carb when he notices his VP's computer turning on. Which is strange, because his VP shut it down hours ago when he left for the night. So he strolls around the office for a few minutes and catches another offline computer booting up. This is weird. He goes back to his desk and the blood drains from his face when he sees the comps he's spent hours spreading have disappeared from his screen and been replaced by what appears to be Chinese characters. Then his screen goes blank. Chaos erupts among the analysts as all their screens go blank at the same moment.

On another floor, an overnight trader notices a huge spike in the Yen and a collapse in the Euro and dollar before his screen goes blank. He panics, knowing that he must be tripping stops right and left. He tries to reboot to no avail. His phone starts ringing, and it's his MD who clearly just woke up. "WTF is going on down there?" his MD screams, but the trader has no answers. His computer comes back online for a moment, but only long enough for him to see his P&L hemorrhaging red. Then everything goes blank.

If this sounds like something out of a spy novel, you'd better get ready to see it in real life. Because it's happening on June 28. Dubbed Quantum Dawn 2, Wall Street is going to come under simulated cyber attack to test the system readiness and response time in the event of a massive worldwide hacker attack. By scheduling it for June 28, they're hoping to take advantage of what should be a quiet summer Friday where (hopefully) it won't cause any real chaos.

During the exercise, which runs from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in New York, participants will receive blasts of vague and confusing information about what appears to be a hacker attack on fake trading and information platforms that are not plugged into actual markets. The participants may see “latency,” or unusual slowness, in trading, or viruses trying to invade the systems. They will also have to call one another to figure out what’s going on.

Some of you may remember the first Quantum Dawn back in 2011 where they simulated an armed attack on the exchanges. This one is all in cyberspace, however, and is designed to create even more uncertainty in order to test executive's responses to little or bad information.

I think it's pretty cool that they're doing this and that the major banks are participating. With our financial system almost 100% digital these days, it represents an all too tempting single point of failure for a terrorist attack. Even though we can't prepare for every eventuality, it's good that they're thinking about these kinds of things.

I might buy a few DXD calls on June 27. You know, just in case...