New Zealand Stock Exchange Suffers Day Four Disruption Following DDoS Attacks

The New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) is still suffering from the aftermath of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that hit the exchange earlier this week.

On Friday morning, the NZX said its markets would open as normal, following ongoing work to put in place additional measures to maintain system connectivity and address the severe DDoS attacks. 

Two hours later, however, the NZX said it was experiencing connectivity issues which appeared to be similar to those caused by the DDoS attacks from earlier this week.

"Given the current issue, we have extended the pre-open for the NZX main board and Fonterra shareholders market. The NZX debt market was placed into a halt at 9:58am [NZST]," the exchange said. "The NZX derivatives market remains open."

See also: DDoS extortionists target NZX, Moneygram, Braintree, and other financial services

The exchange was aiming for business as usual on Friday, after keeping the NZX main board, NZX debt market, and Fonterra shareholders market offline on Thursday and closing the NZX derivatives market at 11:00am NZST.

The exchange's website is currently offline.

NZX was on Tuesday struck down by a DDoS attack, which resulted in the exchange halting trade in its cash markets from 3:57pm NZST.

A joint statement made earlier this week by NZX and its network service provider Spark said the DDoS attack came from offshore, via Spark's networks, to impact NZX system connectivity.

The NZX has since been repeatedly targeted by the attacks.

Earlier on Thursday, ZDNet reported the attacks were attributed to a criminal gang that has launched DDoS attacks against some of the world's biggest financial service providers and demanded Bitcoin payments as extortion fees to stop their attacks.

The NZX and Spark were hopeful markets would resume normal operations on Wednesday.

NZX said it has been continuing to work with Spark, and national and international cybersecurity partners, including GCSB, to address the attacks. 

The exchange said it has been in close contact with market participants and that it "appreciates the support and level of understanding during the periods of disruption to trading".

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