The New Zealand stock market has been hit by a fifth day of cyber-attacks, crashing its website.
However, the site maintained trading after switching to a contingency plan for the release of market announcements, according to Reuters. NZX faced disruptions for four days last week when it was hit repeatedly by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which authorities have said originated offshore. As a result, its activity was halted for most of last week.
The attack on august 31, 2020 came shortly after NZX said it had agreed with the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) on a back-up plan for the release of market announcements. A spokesman for NZX confirmed the website was down, but said trading on its platform, which began at 10.00 a.m. local time (2200 GMT), was continuing as usual through the contingency arrangements.
He declined to comment on who was behind the attacks, whether there had been any extortion demand or what measures have been put in place to stop future attacks.
The bourse said in a statement that the exchange was working with its network’s service provider, Spark, government cybersecurity agencies, and a US-based cybersecurity company Akamai Technologies to implement additional security measures.
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