The New Zealand NZX exchange is targeting four days of DDoS attacks this week.
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The New Zealand Stock Exchange stopped trading for a fourth day in a row on Friday due to multiple cyber attacks.
“We are currently experiencing connectivity issues similar to those caused by severe offshore DDoS attacks this week,” said Wellington-based exchange operator NZX Ltd. NZX,
said in a statement. The NZX website was down as well. DDoS, as distributed denial of service, invades a targeted server or network with traffic.
ZDNet.com reports that a global criminal syndicate is behind the attacks, which are part of a global campaign to extort bitcoin from some of the largest financial and e-commerce companies in the world. PayPal PYPL,
and its Venmo service are also targeted, said ZDNet, along with MoneyGram MGI,
YesBank India, Worldpay and Braintree.
The hackers are presumably the same as those identified by Akamai Technologies Inc. AKAM,
in a warning earlier this week, sending bail letters demanding bitcoin to companies in the US, UK and Asia-Pacific region. The hackers claim to be from the Armada Collective and Fancy Bear groups, but it is believed that they are not actually affiliated with these infamous hacker organizations.
NZX is working with its Internet service providers, such as cybersecurity partners and the New Zealand National Security Agency, the New Zealand Herald reported.
The repeated interruptions in service have raised serious concerns about the security of the exchange, and raised fears that cyber attacks could be the prelude to moves against larger global exchanges.
Professor Dave Parry of the Computer Science Department of Auckland University of Technology told New Zealand News News that it was “a very serious attack on critical infrastructure in New Zealand”, and “points to a level of sophistication and determination that is relatively rare. . ”
Before trading stopped, the New Zealand NZX-50 index NZ50GR,
was close to its all-time high of 12,073.34, set in February.
Separately, a DDoS bitcoin extortion scheme at the TSLA of Tesla Inc.,
Giga plant in Nevada was apparently opposed by the FBI earlier this month, and a Russian national was arrested in the scheme.
.
