Anonymous Messes With NYSE

Anonymous didn't exactly "erase" the New York Stock Exchange website yesterday—but the group may have messed with it, for about a minute. Anonymous called on its supporters to launch a "distributed denial of service" attack, which overwhelms website traffic. The NYSE website slowed before becoming unavailable for just over 60 seconds between 3:35pm and 3:37pm on a day of light trading because of the Columbus Day holiday, reports the Chicago Tribune.

Service was also slowed at other times in the afternoon. An exchange spokesman denied that Anonymous had any impact. "We detected no service outage on our corporate website," he said, adding that trades were not affected. The Anonymous action was taken in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. (More Anonymous stories.)