The New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) has yet again crashed today for the third time in as many days, as the Exchange deals with reported cyber attacks.
The NZX said in a statement earlier today that it had to halt trading at 11.10 am New Zealand time on its cash markets as it experienced a connectivity issue with its system. The trading halt came when the S&P NZX-50 was yet again close to hitting an all-time high.
In a statement earlier today, the exchange operator said: "NZX is continuing to work with its network provider [Spark] to investigate the source of the issue, following volumetric DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks from offshore on 25 and 26 August."
Another Blow for NZX
As Finance Magnates reported, yesterday the exchange went offline for a number of hours, after placing a trading halt on its cash markets at approximately 11.24am New Zealand time, before resuming operations at 3.00 pm.
This included the NZX Main Board, NZX Debt Market and Fonterra Shareholders Market. This was the second attack for the New Zealand exchange, with a similar incident occurring on Tuesday.
In a joint statement on Tuesday with Spark, NZX’s network provider, the exchange communicated: “As such, NZX decided to halt trading in its cash markets at approximately [3.57pm]. A DDoS Attack aims to disrupt service by saturating a network with significant volumes of internet traffic.”
The outage on Tuesday came at the same time that the New Zealand market was close to its all-time high. The S&P/NZX 50 Index closed at 11,993.18 points. This was up 72.10 points or 0.6 per cent.
According to experts, the sustained cyber-attacks on the exchange indicate a high level of sophistication and determination. It is currently not clear who is attacking the exchange. The multiple shutdowns of the exchange follow on from a series of attacks in the region.
