New Zealands stock exchange ransomware problem

T

he New Zealand stock exchange has halted trading for the third day in a row as a result of criminal cyberattacks.

• According to a report by Bloomberg on Thursday, the NZX exchange has suffered connectivity issues leading to a series of outages that were the result of targeted disruption by bad actors from outside the country.

• The criminals are demanding bitcoin in order to cease the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which flood the bandwidth of a particular system with traffic rendering it slow or unusable.

• The exchange suffered outages during the last hour of trading on Tuesday and again for over three hours on Wednesday.

• Today’s outage has yet to be resolved, according to Bloomberg.

• According to another report by ZDNet, the attacks may be directed by a criminal cyber gang using monikers like Amada Collective and Fancy Bear that belong to more famous hacker groups.

• Specifically, the attackers have been targeting the exchange's hosting service Spark, demonstrating a level of sophistication by regularly changing the protocols involved.

• Over recent weeks, the group has tried to extort bitcoin from other well-known financial services including PayPal, MoneyGram, YesBank India, Braintree, and Venmo.

Sorry I have to laugh out loud *lol* because read my articles before. Just setting up an internet proxy combined with an extranet and intranet removes the problems. Its an investment of maybe $5000 to protect the exchange IT. And remember this is known since 2007 !!! How many companies will hesitate to create a proxy secured environment? They all will be victims of ransomware sooner or later.