Trading on the New Zealand’s stock exchange was halted Thursday in a possible repeat of a cyber attack that has already interrupted trading twice this week.
“A trading halt was put on cash markets due to a systems connectivity issue,” exchange operator NZX said in a statement. “NZX is continuing to work with its network provider to investigate the source of the issue following volumetric distributed denial of service attacks from offshore on August 25 and 26.”
Trading was disrupted for the last hour on Tuesday and for more than three hours yesterday due to the attacks, and today’s event appears similar. NZX is under growing pressure to provide more information about the outages, which come as the market nears a fresh record high.
NZX has not yet responded to questions from the media about what steps it’s taking to prevent further disruption to trading, whether it knows where the cyber attacks came from and whether it has received any demands in conjunction with them.
A denial of service attack is an attempt to disrupt service by saturating a network with significant volumes of internet traffic. By impacting the website and the company announcement platform, the attack prevents adequate information disclosure and forces the NZX to halt trading.
Prices and index updates stopped around 11:10 a.m. in Wellington when the benchmark S&P/NZX-50 index was up 0.2% at 12,053. The record closing high is 12,073.
