New Zealand’s Stock Exchange Hit by Cyber-Attacks Two Days in a Row

New Zealand’s stock exchange has been subjected to a cyber-attack for the second day running, it has been reported.

As covered by the Guardian today, at 11.24 am local time on Wednesday August 26, the NZX exchange went offline, causing some trading to be halted although connectivity was partially restored. The NZX acknowledged it had experienced “network connectivity issues,” leading to the NZX main board, NZX debt market and Fonterra shareholders market being placed on temporary hold. Those areas were subsequently allowed to resume trading at 3.00 pm.

This incident followed a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the stock exchange the previous day, Tuesday August 25, which forced it to call a halt to trading at 3.57 pm. In a statement published on August 26 referring to this attack, the NZX suggested foreign hackers were to blame: “Yesterday afternoon NZX experienced a volumetric DDoS attack from offshore via its network service provider, which impacted NZX network connectivity. The systems impacted included NZX websites and the Markets Announcement Platform.”

It added: “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 new incidents have occurred shortly after a series of alleged state-sponsored attacks against a range of government and private-sector organizations in Australia.

Nick Turner, VP EMEA at Druva, said that attacks against high profile targets are more likely to be successful amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: “Today’s second atta ..

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