Company processes $2 trillion in transactions a month.
And conveniently hacked to prevent short selling during market melt up.
If you think you are well covered in 2024 with assets safe, think again.
There are very few ways to insulate yourself from the coming fallout.
Neither gold or crypto are the amswer fyi.
Amid the meltup of most shorted names in the past two days, numerous daytraders were greeted with an unexpected notification from their broker when they tried to short (or re-short) some of these highflying ultra junk names: “rejected.”
There was much confusion why so many were unable to short these very popular shorts, especially if the shorts were willing to pay the oftentimes exorbitant Hart To Borrow rates on the shorts, but today we finally got an answer: as Bloomberg reports, EquiLend – a fintech that processes trillions of dollars of securities-lending transactions every month – suffered a cybersecurity attack that shut down some of its operations just days after announcing its sale to a private equity firm.
The company, which has been part-owned by some the world’s biggest financial-services companies until a recent sale to a PE firm, identified a “technical issue” on Jan. 22 that caused portions of its systems to go offline, a spokesperson for New York-based EquiLend told Bloomberg. The cybersecurity incident involved “unauthorized access to our systems,” the spokesperson said.
“We took immediate steps to secure our systems and are working methodically to restore the involved services as quickly as possible,” the spokesperson said.
“We are working with external cybersecurity firms and other professional advisers to assist with our investigation and restoration of service. Clients have been advised that this may take several days.”
AC