SEC Discloses Edgar Corporate Filing System Was Hacked in 2016
Sympathy for the SEC on this one. For its faults, EDGAR is an elegant, useful tool for disseminating a massive amount of information. In an effort to be robust in the service of its presumably thousands of poorly-configured clients (academia, hobbyists, day traders, etc.) it's probably trivial to mistake a hostile act for poor programming practices. We've used this system successfully to fuel tons of projects and only on a few occasions been rate-limited despite numerous logic breakdowns, fork bombs, etc. resulting in traffic spikes that would have been easily mistaken by a smaller organization to be DoS attacks. While it's easy to say they should have been more vigilant, they have probably been <i>deliberately</i> permissive in the service of their mandate. Thanks to their patience, our projects have been served. That sort of patience probably leads to overlooking something like this.