NZX resumes trading after second cyber attack
Wednesday, 26 August 2020
Trading on the NZX sharemarket has resumed, after the exchange suffered two cyber attacks in less than 24 hours.
An NZX spokesman said connectivity had been restored and normal operations resumed at 3pm after being halted at 11.24 am. This included the NZX Main Board, NZX Debt Market and Fonterra Shareholders Market.
“NZX has been in close contact with market participants, and appreciates the support and level of understanding during the periods of disruption to trading,” he said.
The attack on Wednesday morning came less than a day after the first one, affecting thesharemarket operators’ website.
On Wednesday morning a spokesman said the NZX was having connectivity issues again and was working with its service provider, Spark, to address it.
“It appears that this is similar to yesterday’s issue,” he said.
Spark was investigating the source of the issue and the NZX would provide further information once available, he said.
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* Major DDoS attack causes NZX power outage, trading halt
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On Tuesday, the NZX was brought to an abrupt halt just before 4pm due to a major power outage caused by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack from overseas.
A joint statement from the New Zealand Exchange and network provider Spark said at the time that as a result of the attack the stock exchange operator decided to halt trading in its cash markets at 3.57pm.
“A DDOS attack aims to disrupt service by saturating a network with significant volumes of internet traffic. The attack was able to be mitigated and connectivity has now been restored for NZX,” the exchange said.
The NZX issued a statement on Wednesday morning explaining that the Tuesday attack had impacted the NZX websites and the market announcement platform. It said the attack was mitigated and that connectivity had been restored for NZX.
Dr Rizwan Asghar at the school of computer science at Auckland University said it was hard to identify the source of cyber attacks like this because the culprits tended to hide their IP addresses.
“The real root cause is not only the attacker but also the vulnerabilities we have on the way to the target or the victim,” he said.
Targets of these attacks could be any kind of political infrastructure. There were sophisticated solutions to mitigate the effects of an attack, so it depended what methods were being used by the target as to how severe an attack could be, he said.