Nashaq!

Word came out yesterday that Nasdaq found some unwanted files on one of their servers late last year, and no, I’m not talking about naked pictures of Maria Bartiromo:

Computer hackers have breached the systems of the company that runs the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York but did not penetrate the part of the system that handles trades, Nasdaq said Saturday.

The exchange’s operating company, Nasdaq OMX, said in a statement that it had discovered suspicious files on its United States servers, and that it immediately began conducting an investigation in conjunction with outside firms and federal law enforcement agencies.

In internet parlance, whatever this is would probably be called “malware,” or “spyware,” or “im in ur backdoor readin ur filez,” or something like that. In LOLFed parlance, it’s like Ceiling Cat himself has stuck his head into their server:

Nasdaq says this is a separate server from their trading system, so actual trade data would not have been affected. (The bots seem to have no trouble getting the market to go up without resorting to hax, anyways.) The compromised server actually contained software that lets the boards of companies communicate electronically through a means that is more secure than, say, Facebook (or so they thought):

The company said it had determined that a Web-based application on its servers called Directors Desk, on which corporations can store and share information, might have been affected. Nasdaq said the suspicious files “were immediately removed and at this point there is no evidence that any Directors Desk customer information was accessed or acquired by hackers.”

What exactly is Directors Desk? From Nasdaq’s website, it’s a “comprehensive solution designed to improve board communications and effectiveness while relieving corporate executives of the paperwork and time involved in keeping boards informed” and includes email, online discussion boards, web conferencing, contact management, and polls and surveys.

Polls and forums? So the $C board could use this Directors Desk thing to, like, anonymously vote on whether or not Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is a sucker, or $YHOO could debate internally how many instances of the f-bomb are too much? Now that’s the kind of stuff where we at LOLFed wouldn’t mind being a digital fly on the wall.

But we’re guessing (hoping?) boards are probably talking about more important stuff like capex and acquisitions and whatnot, rather than discussing what the best Korean taco truck is near such-and-such-supplier’s headquarters. So I guess this is really like the board of directors of each of the 5,000 companies that use this product all losing their laptops all at once and we don’t know if anyone found them, and if anyone did find them, we don’t know if they did anything with the info. I mean, maybe they were just looking for The Bandit’s social security number so they could take out a Bank of America credit card in his name for s**ts and giggles, who knows.

At any rate, the vagaries above are all that seems to be known right now, though the NYTimes indicates the first inclination of the feds is to blame Russia, for unspecified reasons. While we did our best to get a response from Medvedev on the matter, we were only able to get a low-level plutocrat in Moscow on the phone and my Russian isn’t very good, but I think it translates to something like “In Soviet Russia, database hacks you,” which sounds vaguely omnious so I left it at that.