Cyberattacks have long been seen as a threat to financial markets, but worries are becoming even more acute following a US pipeline hack that set off a public panic and forced the company to pay a ransom.
Financial exchanges that manage daily transactions of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars are an appealing target for hackers.
Major stock exchanges insist they are on top of the issue, but remain mum about what steps they are taking to safeguard their networks.
"Technology and operational resiliency sits at the heart of everything we do," a Nasdaq spokesperson told AFP.
Likewise, the Chicago Board Options Exchange "takes cybersecurity very seriously and does not discuss our cyber defenses publicly," an exchange spokesperson said.
New York Stock Exchange President Stacey Cunningham told CNBC the exchange is "constantly working not only with our own teams but with others in the market, with the regulators and other exchanges on ensuring that markets are secure."
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a key trading venue for energy and agricultural products, declined comment entirely.
Recent history shows the hacking risk is far from a theoretical problem at financial exchanges.
Last August, New Zealand's NZX was crippled for four days following a digital siege.
The episode, a "distributed denial-of-service" attack, is a common type of cyberincident in which hackers saturate a system by sending a huge flood of requests, overwhelming the system and slowing or freezing operations.
"NZX has been advised by independent cyber specialists that the attacks ... are among the largest, most well-resourced and sophisticated they have ever seen in New Zealand," said NZX Chief Executive Mark Peterson said following the ..
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