A DDoS Attack launched on the New Zealand Stock Market reportedly disrupted the stock exchange services for the second day running. But the good news is that the connectivity was restored for the investors within no time, as IT staff of the trading services were proactively prepared for such attacks.
Cybersecurity Insiders has learnt that the NZX Exchange based in Wellington was targeted by a cyber attack at 11:24 am on Wednesday and the services were down includes Fonterra Shareholders, NZX Debt Market and NZX Main Board. And FYI the services were down at the same time on Tuesday i.e. August 25th,2020.
“It was a distributed denial of service attack from a foreign nation and might be possibly launched by state-funded actors to disrupt critical infrastructure in New Zealand- similar to the attacks launched on the Govt and private sector organizations in the neighborhood, Australia,”, said Dave Parr, a computer science professor at the Auckland University of Technology.
Dave added that the hackers launched the attack two times in two days and that shows their determination and sophistication that is relatively rare.
Note- A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) is a cyber attack variant where the servers are bombarded with fake web traffic generated by botnets- as a result of which the server fails to respond to genuine web traffic.
Network providing service to NZX has stated that it has launched a probe to track down the culprits behind the attack and the law enforcement has been informed about the incident.
