"Zombie Software" Blamed for Knight Capital Trading Snafu
POSTED BY: ROBERT N. CHARETTE / WED, AUGUST 15, 2012
"A Bloomberg News story yesterday shed a bit more insight into what caused the uncontrolled electronic trading by the market making brokerage Knight Capital a few weeks ago. It seems a dormant legacy program was somehow "inadvertently reactivated", and then interfered with (or took over?) the firm's trading on 1 August, when a new software trading program Knight had installed began operation. "Once triggered on Aug. 1, the dormant system started multiplying stock trades by one thousand,” Bloomberg was told by two unnamed sources who were briefed on the matter.
Hmm, dead software becomes reanimated, takes over a computer system, and then runs amok. I think I've seen that movie somewhere.
Also, according to the sources, “Knight’s staff looked through eight sets of software before determining what happened.” Almost sounds like there was a graveyard full of dead software ready to be reanimated."
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