Technology
How a Dated Cyber-Attack Brought a Stock Exchange to its Knees
DDoS attacks, the cyber equivalent of being mugged, grow in size and sophistication
The New Zealand Stock Exchange building in Wellington.
Photographer: Birgit Krippner/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
The website of the New Zealand Stock Exchange slowed to a crawl on a Tuesday afternoon in August. It was so badly throttled that the exchange couldn’t post market announcements, as required by financial regulators. So with an hour left for trading, management shut the entire operation down.
It didn’t take long to figure out what happened. The website had been overwhelmed by a tsunami of offshore digital traffic. An email from the perpetrators made clear that it was a malicious attack.