Chinese hackers behind United Airlines breach?
As we reported in early July, United Airlines, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Stock Exchange all went offline for at least a couple of hours on the same day: "IT glitches" said all three. &nbsp;But now it seems that this was the second such 'glitch' at United in the space of a month, and that the incident of June 2nd may have been related to a massive data breach that occurred in May. &nbsp;There are indications that the attackers had been siphoning-off travel data for some time with at least one domain having been set up for attack purposes in April 2014: that domain (UNITED-AIRLINES.NET) was registered to one James Rhodes of American Samoa. &nbsp;"James Rhodes" is the alias of a Marvel character "War Machine"; the Chinese hackers from the recently dubbed "Black Vine" hacking group have a penchant for "signing off" their work using Marvel comic names. Commentators suggest that the passenger lists will now be used to cross check individual records taken from the OPM hack and the earlier Anthem hack, to identify the global movements of US personnel.
(Updates below.)

Multiple news organizations are reporting that all trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange has been halted.

"NYSE/NYSE MKT has temporarily suspended trading in all symbols," a statement on the exchange's status page read. "Additional information will follow as soon as possible."

The director of floor operations told CNBC's Art Cashin that "it been a little bit of a bumpy day. We had some technical problems even before the opening." Earlier this morning, word spread that there was "a reported issue with a gateway connection," though it's unclear if that's related.

The website for the Wall Street Journal also went dark this morning, and United Airlines was forced to ground all planes after experiencing what company representatives described as a "network connectivity issue."

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This is the second time in less than a month that United has experienced a problem. On June 2nd, the company halted all takeoffs after an error with their computer systems led to a lack of "proper dispatch information."

A Department of Homeland Security official told the Huffington Post's Jennifer Bendery that there's "no indication" that any of these situations are the result of a cyber-attack.

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UPDATE: The assurances from DHS notwithstanding, it's worth noting that last night one of the Twitter accounts associated with the hacktivist group Anonymous wrote the following not-all-that-cryptic tweet:

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