New Zealand’s justice minister says the nation is confronting cyberattacks on an unprecedented scale, targeting everything from the stock market to the weather service.
Andrew Little said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday that tracking down the perpetrators of the attacks in recent weeks would be extremely difficult, as the distributed denial of service attacks are being routed through thousands of computers.
One line of investigation is the emails sent to people in some of the targeted organizations demanding a ransom in exchange for stopping the attacks, Little said. The official advice is to never, ever pay a ransom.
Little said he’s been told that the sheer volume of data used by the attackers is unprecedented. New Zealand’s foreign spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, is helping with the investigation and working to protect companies targeted in what it says appears to be part of a global campaign.
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The attacks stopped share trading for up to several hours at a time over four days last week. Private company NZX, which hosts the market, said it halted trading to maintain market integrity because the attacks prevented it from publishing market announcements.
Little said the attackers had found vulnerabilities in the stock market’s operations.
“That motivated them to continue the attack, and they picked on other organizations as well,” he said.
One of those was the bank TSB, which was hit Tuesday. Chief Executive Donna Cooper ..
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